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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 


ANTHROPOLOGY 


By R. R. MARETT, M.A., D.Sc. 


LONDON 


WILLIAMS & NORGATE 





HENRY HOLT & Co., New Yorx 
Canada: WM. BRIGGS, Toronto 
Inpia: R. & T. WASHBOURNE, Lrp. 


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UNIVERSITY 
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OF 


MODERN KNOWLEDGE 


Editors : 
HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A., LL.D. 


Pror. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LITT., 
LL.D., F.B.A. 


Pror. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., 
LL.D. 


Pror. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 
(Columbia University, U.S.A.) 


NEW YORK Rs | 
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We ie ed) ais 


Saf 6 NTHROPOLOGY pee 


BY 


R. R. MARETT, M.A., D.Sc. 


READER IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY 

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

AUTHOR OF ‘“‘ THE THRESHOLD OF 
RELIGION,” ETC. 





First printed, January 1912 
Revised and Printed, May 1914 


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CONTENTS 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 


RACE “ . . 
ENVIRONMENT . . 
LANGUAGE . 3 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 


LAW . : . 


RELIGION ; : 
MORALITY d L 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 


INDEX ; . 


PAGE 


Volumes of kindred interest already published in 
this series are : 


Prehistoric Britain. Dr. R. Munro, 
Ancient Art and Ritual. Jane Harrison, LL. D., D.Litt. 


Comparative Religion. Principal J. Estlin Carpenter, 
LL.D. 


The Dawn of History. Prof. J. L. Myres. 

Peoples and Problems of India. Sir T. W. Holderness, 
The Civilisation of China. Prof. H. A. Giles. 

The Opening-up of Africa. Sir H. H. Johnston. 


- ANTHROPOLOGY 


CHAPTER I 
SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 


In this chapter I propose to say something, 
firstly, about the ideal scope of anthropology ; 
secondly, about its ideal limitations; and, 
thirdly and lastly, about its actual relations 
to existing studies. In other words, I shall 
examine the extent of its claim, and then go 
on to examine how that claim, under modern 
conditions of science and education, is to be 
made good. 

Firstly, then, what is the ideal scope of 
anthropology ? Taken at its fullest and best, 
what ought it to comprise ? 

Anthropology is the whole history of man 
as fired and pervaded by the idea of evolution. 
Man in evolution—that is the subject in its 
full reach. Anthropology studies man as he 
occurs at all known times. It studies him as he 
occurs in all known parts of the world. It 


studies him body and soul together—as a 
7 


8 ANTHROPOLOGY 


bodily organism, subject to conditions operat- 
ing in time and space, which bodily organism 
is in intimate relation with a soul-life, also 
subject to those same conditions. Having 
an eye to such conditions from first to last, 
it seeks to plot out the general series of the 
changes, bodily and mental together, under- 
gone by man in the course of his history. Its 
business is simply to describe. But, without 
exceeding the limits of its scope, it can and 
must proceed from the particular to the 
general; aiming at nothing less than a de- 
scriptive formula that shall sum up the whole 
series of changes in which the evolution of 
man consists. | 

That will do, perhaps, as a short account of 
the ideal scope of anthropology. Being short, 
it is bound to be rather formal and colourless. 
To put some body into it, however, it is neces- 
sary to breathe but a single word. That word 
is: Darwin. 

Anthropology is the child of Darwin. 
Darwinism makes it possible. Reject the 
Darwinian point of view, and you must reject 
anthropology also. What, then, is Darwin- 
ism? Not a cut-and-dried doctrine. Not a 
dogma. Darwinism is a working hypothesis. 
You suppose something to be true, and work 
away to see whether, in the light of that 
supposed truth, certain facts fit together 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 9 


better than they do on any other supposition. 
What is the truth that Darwinism supposes ? 
Simply that all the forms of life in the world 
are related together; and that the relations 
manifested in time and space between the 
different lives are sufficiently uniform to be 
described under a general formula, or law of 
evolution. 

This means that man must, for certain 
purposes of science, toe the line with the rest 
of living things. And at first, naturally 
enough, man did not like it. He was too 
lordly. For a long time, therefore, he pre- 
tended to be fighting for the Bible, when he 
was really fighting for his own dignity. This 
was rather hard on the Bible, which has 
nothing to do with the Aristotelian theory 
of the fixity of species; though it might seem 
possible to read back something of the kind 
into the primitive creation-stories preserved 
in Genesis. Now-a-days, however, we have 
mostly got over the first shock to our family 
pride. We are all Darwinians in a passive 
kind of way. But we need to darwinize 
actively. In the sciences that have to do with 
plants, and with the rest of the animals 
besides man, naturalists have been so active 
in their darwinizing that the pre-Darwinian 
stuff is once for all laid by on the shelf. 
When man, however, engages on the subject 


10 ANTHROPOLOGY 


of his noble self, the tendency still is to say: 
We accept Darwinism so long as it is not 
allowed to count, so long as we may go on 
believing the same old stuff in the same old 
way. . 

How do we anthropologists propose to 
combat this tendency ? By working away 
at our subject, and persuading people to have 
a look at our results. Once people take up 
anthropology, they may be trusted not to drop 
it again. It is like learning to sleep with your 
window open. What could be more stupefy- 
ing than to shut yourself up in a closet and 
swallow your own gas? But is it any less 
stupefying to shut yourself up within the last 
few thousand years of the history of your own 
corner of the world, and suck in the stale 
atmosphere of its own self-generated preju- 
dices ? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthro- 
pology is lke travel. Every one starts by 
thinking that there is nothing so perfect as 
his own parish. But let a man go aboard 
ship to visit foreign parts, and, when he returns 
home, he will cause that parish to wake up. 

With Darwin, then, we anthropologists 
say: Let any and every portion of human 
history be studied in the light of the whole 
history of mankind, and against the back- 
ground of the history of living things in 
general. It is the Darwinian outlook that 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 11 


matters. None of Darwin’s particular doc- 
trines will necessarily endure the test of time 
and trial. Into the melting-pot must they 
go as often as any man of science deems it 
fitting. But Darwinism as the touch of nature 
that makes the whole world kin can hardly 
pass away. At any rate, anthropology stands 
or falls with the working hypothesis, derived 
from Darwinism, of a fundamental kinship 
and continuity amid change between all the 
forms of human life. 

It remains to add that, hitherto, anthro- 
pology has devoted most of its attention to 
the peoples of rude—that is to say, of simple 
—culture, who are vulgarly known to us as 
‘savages.’ The main reason for this, I 
suppose, is that nobody much minds so long 
as the darwinizing kind of history confines 
itself to outsiders. Only when it is applied 
to self and friends is it resented as an im- 
pertinence. But, although it has always up 
to now pursued the line of least resistance, 
anthropology does not abate one jot or tittle 
of its claim to be the whole science, in the sense 
of the whole history, of man. As regards the 
word, call it science, or history, or anthro- 
pology, or anything else—what does it 
matter? As regards the thing, however, 
there can be no compromise. We anthro- 
pologists are out to secure this: that there 


12 ANTHROPOLOGY 


shall not be one kind of history for savages 
and another kind for ourselves, but the same 
kind of history, with the same evolutionary 
principle running right through it, for all 
men, civilized and savage, present and past. 


So much for the ideal scope of anthropology. 
Now, in the second place, for its ideal limita- 
tions. Here, I am afraid, we must touch fora 
moment on very deep and difficult questions. 
But it is well worth while to try at all costs 
to get firm hold of the fact that anthropology, 
though a big thing, is not everything. 

It will be enough to insist briefly on the 
following points : that anthropology is science 
in whatever way history is science; that it is 
not philosophy, though it must conform to 
its needs; and that it is not policy, though it 
may subserve its designs. 

Anthropology is science in the sense of 
specialized research that- aims at truth for 
truth’s sake. Knowing by parts is science, 
knowing the whole as a whole is philosophy. 
Each supports the other, and there is no 
profit in asking which of the two should come 
first. One is aware of the universe as the 
whole universe, however much one may be 
resolved to study its details one at a time. 
The scientific mood, however, is uppermost 
when one says: Here is a particular lot of 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 138 


things that seem to hang together in a parti- 
cular way; let us try to get a general idea 
of what that way is. Anthropology, then, 
specializes on the particular group of human 
beings, which itself is part of the larger par- 
ticular group of living beings. Inasmuch as 
it takes over the evolutionary principle from 
the science dealing with the larger group, 
namely biology, anthropology may be re- 
garded as a branch of biology. Let it be 
added, however, that, of all the branches 
of biology, it is the one that is likely to bring 
us nearest to the true meaning of life; because 
the life of human beings must always be 
nearer to human students of life than, say, the 
life of plants. 

But, you will perhaps object, anthropology 
was previously identified with history, and 
now it is identified with science, namely, with 
a branch of biology ? Is history science ? 
The answer is, Yes. I know that a great 
many people who call themselves historians 
say that it is not, apparently on the ground 
that, when it comes to writing history, truth 
for truth’s sake is apt to bring out the wrong 
results. Well, the doctored sort of history 
is not science, nor anthropology, I am ready 
to admit. But now let us listen to another 
and a more serious objection to the claim of 
history to be science. Science, it will be said 


14 ANTHROPOLOGY 


by many earnest men of science, aims at 
discovering laws that are clean out of time. 
History, on the other hand, aims at no more 
than the generalized description of one or 
another phase of a time-process. To this 
it may be replied that physics, and physics 
only, answers to this altogether too narrow 
conception of science. The laws of matter 
in motion are, or seem to be, of the timeless 
or mathematical kind. Directly we pass on 
to biology, however, laws of this kind are 
not to be discovered, or at any rate are not 
discovered. Biology deals with life, or, if 
you like, with matter as living. Matter 
moves. Life evolves. We have entered a 
new dimension of existence. The laws of 
matter in motion are not abrogated, for the 
simple reason that in physics one makes 
abstraction of life, or in other words leaves 
its peculiar effects entirely out of account. 
But they are transcended. They are multi- 
plied by a, an unknown quantity. This 
being so from the standpoint of pure 
physics, biology takes up. the tale afresh, and 
devises means of its own for describing the 
particular ways in which things hang together 
in virtue of their being alive. And biology 
finds that it cannot conveniently abstract 
away the reference to time. It cannot treat 
living things as machines. What does it do, 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 15 


then? It takes the form of history. it 
states that certain things have changed in 
certain ways, and goes on to show, so far as 
it can, that the changes are on the whole in 
a certain direction. In short, it formulates 
tendencies, and these are its only laws. Some 
tendencies, of course, appear to be more en- 
during than others, and thus may be thought 
to approximate more closely to laws of the 
timeless kind. But a, the unknown quantity, 
the something or other that is not physical, 
runs through them all, however much or little 
they may seem to endure. For science, at 
any rate, which departmentalizes the world, 
and studies it bit by bit, there is no getting 
over the fact that living beings in general, 
and human beings in particular, are subject 
to an evolution which is simple matter of 
history. 

And now what about philosophy ? I am 
not going into philosophical questions here. 
For that reason I am not going to describe 
biology as natural history, or anthropology 
as the natural history of man. Let philoso- 
phers discuss what “nature’’ is going to mean 
for them. In science the word is question- 
begging; and the only sound rule in science 
is to beg as. few philosophical questions as you 
possibly can. Everything in the world is 
natural, of course, in the sense that things are 


16 ANTHROPOLOGY 


somehow all akin—all of a piece. We are simply 
bound to take in the parts as parts of a whole, 
and it is just this fact that makes philosophy 
not only possible but inevitable. All the 
same, this fact does not prevent the parts 
from having their own specific natures and 
specific ways of behaving. The people who 
identify the natural with the physical are 
putting all their money on one specific kind 
of nature or behaviour that is to be found in 
the world. In the case of man they are 
backing the wrong horse. The horse to 
back is the horse that goes. As a going 
concern, however, anthropology, as part of 
evolutionary biology, is a history of vital 
tendencies which are not natural in the sense 
of merely physical. 

What are the functions of philosophy as 
contrasted with science? Two. Firstly, it 
must be critical. It must police the city of 
the sciences, preventing them from interfering 
with each other’s rights and free development. 
Co-operation by all means, as, for instance, 
between anthropology and biology. But no 
jumping other folks’ claims and laying down 
the law for all; as, for instance, when physics 
would impose the kind of method applicable 
to machines on the sciences of evolving life. 
Secondly, philosophy must be synthetic. It 
must put all the ways of knowing together, and 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 17 


likewise put these in their entirety together 
with all the ways of feeling and acting; so that 
there may result a theory of reality and of 
the good life, in that organic interdependence 
of the two which our very effort to put things 
together presupposes as its object. 

~ What, then, are to be the relations between 
anthropology and philosophy ? On the one 
hand, the question whether anthropology can 
help philosophy need not concern us here. 
That is for the philosopher to determine. 
On the other hand, philosophy can help 
anthropology in two ways: in its critical 
capacity, by helping it to guard its own claim, 
and develop freely without interference from 
outsiders; and in its synthetic capacity, 
perhaps, by suggesting the rule that, of two 
types of explanation, for instance, the 
physical and the biological, the more abstract 
is likely to be farther away from the whole 
truth, whereas, contrariwise, the more you 
take in, the better your chance of really 
understanding. 

It remains to speak about policy. I use 
this term to mean any and all practical 
exploitation of the results of science. Some- 
times, indeed, it is hard to say where science 
ends and policy begins, as we saw in the case 
of those gentlemen who would doctor their 
history, because practically it pays to have 

B 


18 ANTHROPOLOGY 


a good conceit of ourselves, and believe that 
our side always wins its battles. Anthro- 
pology, however, would borrow something 
besides the evolutionary principle from 
biology, namely, its disinterestedness. It is 
not hard to be candid about bees and ants; 
unless, indeed, one is making a parable of 
them. But as anthropologists we must try, 
what is so much harder, to be candid about 
ourselves. Let us look at ourselves as if we 
were so many bees and ants, not forgetting, 
of course, to make use of the inside informa- 
tion that in the case of the insects we so 
conspicuously lack. 

This does not mean that human history, 
once constructed according to truth-regarding 
principles, should and could not be used for 
the practical advantage of mankind. The 
anthropologist, however, is not, as such, con- 
cerned with the practical employment to which 
his discoveries are put. At most, he may, on 
the strength of a conviction that truth is 
mighty and will prevail for human good, 
invite practical men to study his facts and 
generalizations in the hope that, by knowing 
mankind better, they may come to appreciate 
and serve it better. For instance, the ad- 
ministrator, who rules over savages, is almost 
invariably quite well-meaning, but not seldom 
utterly ignorant of native customs and beliefs, 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY = 19 


So, in many cases, is the missionary, another 
type of person in authority, whose intentions 
are of the best, but whose methods too often 
leave much to be desired. No amount 
of zeal: will suffice, apart from scientific in- 
sight into the conditions of the practical 
problem. And the education is to be got by 
paying forit. But governments and churches, 
with some honourable exceptions, are still 
wofully disinclined to provide their pro- 
bationers with the necessary special training; 
though it is ignorance that always proves most 
costly in the long run. Policy, however, 
including bad policy, does not come within 
the official cognizance of the anthropologist. 
Yet it is legitimate for him to hope that, just 
as for many years already physiological 
science has indirectly subserved the art of 
medicine, so anthropological science may 
indirectly, though none the less effectively, 
subserve an art of political and religious 
healing in the days to come. 


The third and last part of this chapter will 
show how, under modern conditions of science 
and education, anthropology is to realize its 
programme. Hitherto, the trouble with an- 
thropologists has been to see the wood for the 
trees. Even whilst attending mainly to the 
peoples of rude culture, they have heaped | 


20 ANTHROPOLOGY 


together facts enough to bewilder both them- 
selves and their readers. The time has come 
to do some sorting; or rather the sorting is 
doing itself. Al] manner of groups of special! 
students, interested in some particular side 
of human history, come now-a-days to the 
anthropologist, asking leave to borrow fron 
his stock of facts the kind that they happen 
to want. ‘Thus he, as general storekeeper, is 
beginning to acquire, almost unconsciously, 
a sense of order corresponding to the demands 
that are made upon him. ‘The goods that he 
will need to hand out in separate batches 
are being gradually arranged by him on separ- 
ate shelves. Our best way, then, of proceed- 
ing with the present inquiry, is to take note 
of these shelves. In other words, we must 
consider one by one the special studies that 
claim to have a finger in the anthropological 
ie? 
Or, to avoid the disheartening task of re- 
viewing an array of bloodless “ -ologies,” let 
us put the question to ourselves thus: Be it 
supposed that a young man or woman who 
wants to take a course, of at least a year’s 
length, in the elements of anthropology, joins 
some university which is thoroughly in touch 
with the scientific activities of the day. A 
university, as its very name implies, ought 
to be an all-embracing assemblage of higher 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 21 


studies, so adjusted to each other that, in 
combination, they provide beginners with 
a good general education; whilst, severally, 
they offer to more advanced students the 
opportunity of doing this or that kind of 
specific research. In such a well-organized 
university, then, how would our budding 
anthropologist proceed to form a preliminary 
acquaintance with the four corners of his 
subject ? What departments must he attend 
m turn? Let us draw him up a curriculum, 
praying meanwhile that the multiplicity of the 
demands made upon him will not take away 
his breath altogether. Man is a many-sided 
being; so there is no help for it if anthropology 
also is many-sided. 

For one thing, he must sit at the feet of 
those whose particular concern is with pre- 
historic man. It is well to begin here, since 
thus will the glamour of the subject sink into 
his soul at the start. Let him, for instance, 
travel back in thought to the Europe of many 
thousands of years ago, shivering under the 
effects of the great ice-age, yet populous with 
human beings so far like ourselves that they 
were alive to the advantage of a good fire, 
made handy tools out of stone and wood 
and bone, painted animals on the walls of 
their caves, or engraved them on mammoth- 
ivory, far more skilfully than most of us could 


no 


2 ANTHROPOLOGY 


do now, and buried their dead in a ceremonial 
way that points to a belief in a future life. 
Thus, too, he will learn betimes how to 
blend the methods and materials of different 
branches of science. A human skull, let us 
say, and some bones of extinct animals, and 
some chipped flints are all discovered side 
by side some twenty feet below the level of 
the soil. At least four separate authorities 
must be called in before the parts of the 
puzzle can be fitted together. 

Again, he must be taught something about 
race, or inherited breed, as it applies to man. 
A dose of practical anatomy—that is to say, 
some actual handling and measuring of the 
principal portions of the human frame in its 
leading varieties—will enable our beginner to 
appreciate the differences of outer form that 
distinguish, say, the British colonist in 
Australia from the native “ bhack-fellow,”’ or 
the whites from the negroes, and redskins, 
and yellow Asiatics in the United States. At 
this point, he may profitably embark on the 
details of the Darwinian hypothesis of the 
descent of man. Let him search amongst the 
_ manifold modern versions of the theory of 

human evolution for the one that comes 
nearest to explaining the degrees of physical 
likeness and unlikeness shown by men in 
general as compared with the animals, espe- 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 28 


cially the man-like apes; and again, those 
shown by the men of divers ages and regions 
as compared with each other. Nor is it enough 
for him, when thus engaged, to take note 
simply of physical features—the shape of the 
skull, the colour of the skin, the tint and tex- 
ture of the hair, andso on. There are likewise 
mental characters that seem to be bound up 
closely with the organism and to follow the 
. breed. Such are the so-called instincts, the 

. study of which should be helped out by 
excursions into the mind-history of animals, 
of children, and of the insane. Moreover, the 
measuring and testing of mental functions, 
and, in particular, of the senses, is now-a-days 
carried on by means of all sorts of ingenious 
instruments; and some experience of their use 
will be all to the good, when problems of 
descent are being tackled. 

Further, our student must submit to a 
thorough grounding in world-geography with 
its physical and human sides welded firmly 
together. He must be able to pick out on 
the map the headquarters of all the more 
notable peoples, not merely as they are now, 
but also as they were at various outstanding 
moments of the past. His next business is 
to master the main facts about the natural 
conditions to which each people is subjected 
—the climate, the conformation of land and 


24 ANTHROPOLOGY 


sea, the animals and plants. From here it is 
but a step to the economic life—the food- 
supply, the clothing, the dwelling-places, the | 
principal occupations, the implements of 
labour. A selected list of books of travel 
must be consulted. No less important is it 
to work steadily through the show-cases of 
a good ethnological museum. Nor will it 
suffice to have surveyed the world by regions. 
The communications between regions—the 
migrations and conquests, the trading and the 
borrowing of customs—must be traced and 
accounted for. Finally, on the basis of their 
distribution, which the learner must chart 
out for himself on blank maps of the world, 
the chief varieties of the useful arts and 
appliances of man can be followed from stage 
to stage of their development. 

Of the special studies concerned with man, 
the next in order might seem to be that which 
deals with the various forms of human society ; 
since, In a sense, social organization must 
depend directly on material circumstances. 
In another and perhaps a deeper sense, how- 
ever, the prime condition of true sociality is 
something else, namely, the exclusively human 
gift of articulate speech. To what extent, 
then, must our novice pay attention to the 
history of language ? Speculation about its 
far-off origins is now-a-days rather out of 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 25 


fashion. Moreover, language is no longer 
supposed to provide, by itself at any rate, 
and apart from other clues, a key to the 
endless riddles of racial descent. What is 
most needed, then, is rather some elementary 
instruction concerning the organic connection 
between language and thought, and concerning 
their joint development as viewed against 
the background of the general development of 
society. And, just as words and thoughts 
are essentially symbols, so there are also 
gesture-symbols and written symbols, whilst 
again another set of symbols is in use for 
counting. All these pre-requisites of human 
intercourse may be conveniently taken 
together. 

Coming now to the analysis of the forms 
of society, the beginner must first of all face 
the problem: *“‘ What makes a people one ?”’ 
Neither blood, nor territory, nor language, 
but only the fact of being more or less com- 
pactly organized in a political society, will be 
found to yield the unifying principle required. 
Once the primary constitution of the body 
politic has been made out, a limit is set up, 
inside of which a number of fairly definite 
forms of grouping offer themselves for exami- 
nation; whilst outside of it various social 
relationships of a vaguer kind have also to 
be considered. Thus, amongst institutions of 


26 ANTHROPOLOGY 


the internal kind, the family by itself presents 
a wide field of research; though in certain 
cases it is liable to be overshadowed by some 
other sort of organization, such as, notably, 
the clan. Under the same rubric fall the many 
forms of more or less voluntary association, 
economic, religious, and so forth. On the 
other hand, outside the circle of the body 
politic there are, at all known stages of society, 
mutual understandings that regulate war, 
trade, travel, the celebration of common 
rites, the interchange of ideas. Here, then, is 
an abundance of types of human association, 
to be first scrutinized separately, and after- 
wards considered in relation to each other. 
Closely connected with the previous subject 
is the history of law. Every type of associa- 
tion, in a way, has its law, whereby its 
members are constrained to fulfil a certain 
set of obligations. Thus our student will 
pass on straight from the forms of society to 
the most essential of their functions. ‘Ihe 
fact that, amongst the less civilized peoples, 
the law is uncodified and merely customary, 
whilst the machinery for enforcing it 1s, 
though generally effective enough, yet often 
highly indefinite and occasional, makes the 
tracing of the growth of legal institutions 
from their rudiments no less vitally important, 
though it makes it none the easier. The 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 27 


history of authority is a strictly kindred topic. 
Legislating and judging on the one hand, and 
governing on the other, are different aspects 
of the same general function. In accordance, 
then, with the order already indicated, law 
and government as administered by the 
political society in the person of its repre- 
sentatives, chiefs, elders, war-lords, priest- 
kings, and so forth, must first be examined; 
then the jurisdiction and discipline of sub- 
ordinate bodies, such as the family and the 
clan, or again the religious societies, trade 
guilds, and the rest; then, lastly, the inter- 
national conventions, with the available 
means of ensuring their observance. 

Again, the history of religion is an allied 
theme of far-reaching interest. For the 
understanding of the ruder forms of society 
it may even be said to furnish the master-key. 
At this stage, religion is the mainstay of law 
and government. The constraining force of 
custom makes itself felt largely through a 
magnifying haze of mystic sanctions; whilst, 
again, the position of a leader of society rests 
for the most part on the supernormal powers 
imputed to him. Religion and magic, then, 
must be carefully studied if we would under- 
stand how the various persons and bodies 
that exercise authority are assisted, or else 
hindered, in their efforts to maintain social 


28 ANTHROPOLOGY 


discipline. Apart from this fundamental in- 
quiry, there is another, no less important 
in its way, to which the study of religion 
and magic opens up a path. This is the 
problem how reflection manages as it were 
to double human experience, by setting up 
beside the outer world of sense an inner 
world of thought-relations. Now constructive 
imagination is the queen of those mental 
functions which meet in what we loosely term 
“thought ”; and imagination is ever most 
active where, on the outer fringe of the mind’s 
routine work, our inarticulate questionings 
radiate into the unknown. When the genius 
has his vision, almost invariably, among the 
ruder peoples, it is accepted by himself and 
his society as something supernormal and 
sacred, whether its fruit be an act of leadership 
or an edict, a practical invention or a work 
of art, a story of the past or a prophecy, a 
cure or a devastating curse. Moreover, social 
tradition treasures the memory of these 
revelations, and, blending them with the 
contributions of humbler folk—for all of us 
dream our dreams—provides in myth and 
legend and tale, as well as in manifold other 
art-forms, a stimulus to the inspiration of 
future generations. For most purposes fine art; 
at any rate during its more rudimentary stages, 
may be studied in connection with religion. 


SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 29 


So far as law and religion will not account 
for the varieties of social behaviour, the 
novice may most conveniently consider them 
under the head of morals. The forms of 
social intercourse, the fashions, the festivities, 
are imposed on us by our fellows from without, 
and none the less effectively because as a 
general rule we fall in with them as a matter 
of course. The difference between manners 
and morals of the higher order is due simply 
to the more pressing need, in the case of our 
most serious duties, of a reflective sanction, 
a ‘° moral sense,”’ to break us in to the common 
service. It is no easy task to keep legal and 
religious penalties or rewards out of the 
reckoning, when trying to frame an estimate 
of what the notions of right and wrong, pre- 
valent in a given society, amount to in them- 
selves; nevertheless, it is worth doing, and 
valuable collections of material exist to aid 
the work. The facts about education, which 
even amongst rude peoples is often carried 
on far into manhood, throw much light on 
this problem. So do the moralizings embodied 
in the traditional lore of the folk—the proverbs, 
the beast-fables, the stories of heroes. 

There remains the individual to be studied 
in himself. If the individual be ignored 
by social science, as would sometimes appear 
to be the case, so much the worse for social 


30 ANTHROPOLOGY 


science, which, to a corresponding extent, 
falls short of being truly anthropological. 
Throughout the history of man, our beginner 
should be on the look-out for the signs, and 
the effects, of personal initiative. Freedom 
of choice, of course, is limited by what there 
is to choose from; so that the development of 
what may be termed social opportunity should 
be concurrently reviewed. Again, it is the 
aim of every moral system so to educate 
each man that his directive self may be as 
far as possible identified with his social self. 
Even suicide is not @ man’s own affair, 
according to the voice of society which speaks 
in the moral code. Nevertheless, lest the 
important truth be overlooked that social 
control implies a will that must meet the con- 
trol half-way, it is well for the student of 
man to pay separate and special attention 
to the individual agent. The last word in 
anthropology is: Know thyself. 


CHAPTER II 
ANTIQUITY OF MAN 


History, in the narrower sense of the word, 
depends on written records. As we follow 
back history to the point at which our written 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 31 


records grow hazy, and the immediate ances- 
tors or predecessors of the peoples who appear 
in history are disclosed in legend that needs 
much eking out by the help of the spade, we 
pass into proto-history. At the back of that, 
again, beyond the point at which written 
records are of any avail at all, comes pre- 
history. 

How, then, you may well inquire, does the 
pre-historian get to work? What is his 
method of linking facts together ?. And what 
are the sources of his information ? 

First, as tohis method. Suppose a number 
of boys are in a field playing football, whose 
superfluous garments are lying about every- 
where in heaps; and suppose you want, for 
some reason, to find out in what order the boys 
arrived on the ground. How would you set 
about the business? Surely you would go 
to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and 
take note of the fact that this boy’s Jacket 
lay under that boy’s waistcoat. Moving on 
to other heaps you might discover that in some 
cases a boy had thrown down his hat on one | 
heap, his tie on another, and so on. This 
would help you all the more to make out the 
general series of arrivals. Yes, but what if 
some of the heaps showed signs of having 
been upset ? Well, you must make allow- 
ances for these disturbances in your calcula- 


32 ANTHROPOLOGY 


tions. Of course, if some one had deliberately 
made hay with the lot, you would be non- 
plussed. The chances are, however, that, 
given enough heaps of clothes, and bar 
intentional and systematic wrecking of them, 
you would be able to make out pretty well 
which boy preceded which; though you could 
hardly go on to say with any precision whether 
Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half 
an hour. 

Such is the method of pre-history. It is 
called the stratigraphical method, because it 
is based on the description of strata, or 
layers. 

Let me give a simple example of how strata 
tell their own tale. It is no very remarkable 
instance, but happens to be one that I have 
examined for myself. They were digging out 
a place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the 
town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their 
borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, 
which roughly coincides with the present 
mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil 
went down about five feet. Then came a bed 
of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There 
had been a bog here at a time which, to judge 
by similar finds in other places, was just 
before the beginning of the _ bronze-age. 
Underneath the moss-peat came two or three 
feet of silt with sea-shells in it. Clearly the 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 33 


island of Jersey underwent in those days some 
sort of submergence. Below this stratum 
came a great peat-bed, five to seven feet thick, 
with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a 
fine forest that must have needed more or less 
elevated land on which to grow. In the peat 
was a weapon of polished stone, and at the 
bottom were two pieces of pottery, one of 
them decorated with little pitted marks. 
~ These fragments of evidence are enough to 
show that the foresters belonged to the early 
neolithic period, as it is called. Next occurred 
about four feet of silt with sea-shells, marking 
another advance of the sea. Below that, 
again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, of 
the characteristic yellow clay with far-carried 
fragments of rock in it that is associated with 
the great floods of the ice-age. The land must 


- ‘have been above the reach of the tide for the 


glacial drift to settle on it. Finally, three or 
four feet of blue clay resting immediately on 
bed-rock were such as might be produced by 
the sea, and thus probably betokened its 
presence at this level in the still remoter past. 

Here the strata are mostly geological. Man 
only comes in at one point. I might have 
taken a far more striking case—the best I know 
—from St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the 
north of France. Here M. Commont found 


human implements of distinct types in about 
Cc : : 


34 ANTHROPOLOGY 


eight out of eleven or twelve successive 
geological layers. But the story would take 
too long to tell. However, it is well to start 
with an example that is primarily geological. 
For it is the geologist who provides the pre- 
historic chronometer. Pre-historians have to 
reckon in geological time—that is to say, not 
in years, but in ages of indefinite extent 
corresponding to marked changes in the 
condition of the earth’s surface. It takes the 
plain man a long time to find out that it 
is no use asking the pre-historian, who is 
proudly displaying a skull or a stone imple- 
ment, ‘* Please, how many years ago exactly 
did its owner live ?”’ I remember hearing 
such a question put to the great savant, 
M. Cartailhac, when he was lecturing upon the 
pre-historic drawings found in the French and 
Spanish caves; and he replied, “‘ Perhaps not 
less than 6,000 years ago and not more than 
250,000.” The backbone of our present 
system of determining the series of pre- 
historic epochs is the geological theory of an 
ice-age comprising a succession of periods of 
extreme glaciation punctuated by milder 
intervals. It is for the geologists to settle in 
their own way, unless, indeed, the astronomers 
can help them, why there should have been 
an ice-age at all; what was the number, 
extent, and relative duration of its ups and 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 35 


downs; and at what time, roughly, it ceased 
in favour of the temperate conditions that we 
now enjoy. The pre-historians, for their part, 
must be content to make what traces they 
discover of early man fit in with this pre- 
established scheme, uncertain as itis. Every 
day, however, more agreement is being reached 
both amongst themselves and between them 
and the geologists; so that one day, I am 
confident, if not exactly to-morrow, we shall 
know with fair accuracy how the boys, who 
left their clothes lying about, followed one 
another into the field. 

Sometimes, however, geology does not, on 
the face of it, come into the reckoning. Thus 
I might have asked the reader to assist at the 
digging out of a cave, say, one of the famous 
group of caves near Mentone, on the Riviera, 
just at the south-eastern corner of France. 
These caves were inhabited by man during an 
immense stretch of time, and, as you dig down, 
you light upon one layer after another of his 
leavings. But note in such a case as this how 
easily you may be baffled by some one having 
upset the heap of clothes, or, in a word, by 
rearrangement. Thus the man whose leavings 
ought to form the layer half-way up may have 
seen fit to dig a deep hole in the cave-floor in 
order to bury a deceased friend, and with him, 
let us suppose, to bury also an assortment of 


36 ANTHROPOLOGY 


articles likely to be useful in the life beyond the 
grave. Consequently an implement of one 
age will be found lying cheek by jowl with the 
implement of a much earlier age, or even, it 
may be, some feet below it. Thereupon the 
pre-historian must fall back on the general run, 
or type, in assigning the different implements 
each to its own stratum. Luckily, in the old 
days fashions tended to be rigid; so that 
for the pre-historian two flints with slightly 
different chipping may stand for separate ages 
of culture as clearly as do a Greek vase and 
a German beer-mug for the student of more 
recent times. 


Enough concerning the stratigraphical 
method. A word, in the next place, about the 
pre-historian’s main sources of information. 
Apart from geological facts, there are three 
main classes of evidence that serve to dis- 
tinguish one pre-historic epoch from another. 
These are animal bones, human bones, and 
human handiwork. 

Again I illustrate by means of a case of 
which I happen to have first-hand knowledge. 
In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is a 
cave, in which we dug down through some 
twenty feet of accumulated clay and rock- 
rubbish, presumably the effects of the last 
throes of the ice-age, and came upon a pre- 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 37 


historic hearth. There were the big stones that 
had propped up the fire, and there were the 
ashes. By the side were the remains of a heap 
of iood-refuse. The pieces of decayed bone 
were not much to look at; yet, submitted to 
an expert, they did a tale unfold. He showed 
them to be the remains of the woolly rhino- 
ceros, the mammoth’s even more unwieldy 
comrade, of the reindeer, of two kinds of horse, 
one of them the pony-like wild horse still to 
be found in the Mongolian deserts, of the wild 
ox, and of the deer. Truly there was better 
hunting to be got in Jersey in the days when 
it formed. part of a frozen continent. 

Next, the food-heap yields thirteen of some- 
body’steeth. Hadtheyeatenhim ? It boots 
not to inquire; though, as the owner was aged 
between twenty and thirty, the teeth could 
hardly have fallen out of their own accord. 
Such grinders as they are too! A second 
expert declares that the roots beat all records. 
They are of the kind that goes with an im- 
mensely powerful jaw, needing a massive 
brow-ridge to counteract the strain of the 
bite, and in general involving the type of 
skull known as the Neanderthal, big-brained 
enough in its way, but uncommonly ape-like 
all the same. | 

Pinally, the banqueters have left plenty of 
their knives lying about. These good folk 


38 ANTHROPOLOGY 


had their special and regular way of striking 
off a broad flat flake from the flint core; the 
cores are lying about, too, and with luck you 
can restore some of the flakes to their origina] 
position. Then, leaving one side of the flake 
untouched, they trimmed the surface of the 
remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt 
with use, kept touching them up with the 
hammer-stone—there it is also lying by the 
hearth—until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval 
shape and becomes a pointed triangle. A 
third expert is called in, and has no difficulty 
in recognizing these knives as the characteristic 
handiwork of the epoch known as the Mous- . 
terian. If one of these worked flints from 
Jersey was placed side by side with another 
from the cave of Le Moustier, near the right 
bank of the Vezére in south-central France, 
whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly 
tell which was which; whilst you would still 
see the same family likeness if you compared 
the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, 
or from Northfleet on the Thames, or from 
Icklingham in Suffolk. 

Putting all these kinds of evidence together, 
then, we get a notion, doubtless rather 
meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, 
of a hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get 
the better of a woolly rhinoceros, could cook 
a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 39 


carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally 
knew how, under the very chilly circum- 
stances, both to make himself comfortable 
and to keep his race going. 

There is one other class of evidence on which 
the pre-historian may with due caution draw, 
though the risks are certain and the profits 
uncertain. The ruder peoples of to-day are 

living a life that in its broad features cannot 
' be wholly unlike the life of the men of long 
ago. Thus the pre-historian should study 
Spencer and Gillen on the natives of Central 
Australia, if only that he may take firm hold 
of the fact that people with skulls inclining 
towards the Neanderthal type, and using 
stone knives, may nevertheless have very 
active minds; in short, that a rich enough life 
in its way may leave behind it a poor rubbish- 
heap. When it comes, however, to the 
borrowing of details, to patch up the holes in 
the pre-historic record with modern rags and 
tatters makes better literature than science. 
After all, the Australians, or Tasmanians, or 
Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much is 
beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, 
are our contemporaries—that is to say, have 
just as long an ancestry as ourselves; and in 
the course of the last 100,000 years or so our 
stock has seen so many changes, that their 
stocks may possibly have seen afew also. Yet 


40 ANTHROPOLOGY 


the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse 
of analogy is that the student should make 
himself sufficiently at home in both branches 
of anthropology to know each of the two things 
he compares for what it truly is. 


Having glanced at method and sources, I 
pass on to results. Some text-book must be 
consulted for the long list of pre-historic 
periods required for western Europe, not to 
mention the further complications caused by 
bringing in the remaining portions of the 
world. The stone-age, with its three great 
divisions, the eolithic (eés, Greek for dawn, 
‘ and lithos, stone), the paleolithic (palwos, 
old), and the neolithic (neos, new), and their 
numerous subdivisions, comes first; then the 
age of copper and bronze; and then the early 
iron-age, which is about the limit of proto- 
history. Here I shall confine my remarks to 
Kurope. Iam not going far afield into such 
questions as: Who were the mound-builders 
of North America? And are the Calaveras 
skull and other remains found in the gold- 
bearing gravels of California to be reckoned 
amongst the earliest traces of man in the 
globe ? Nor, again, must I pause to specu- 
late whether the dark-stained lustrous flint 
implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour 
at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN AY 


possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi 
before it had carved the present gorge in the 
solid basalt, prove that likewise in South 
Africa.-man was alive and busy untold 
thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here 
confine myself to the stone-age, because my 
object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree 
of the species from which we are all sprung. 

The antiquity of man being my immediate 
theme, I can hardly avoid saying something 
about eoliths; though the subject is one that 
invariably sets pre-historians at each other’s 
throats. There are eoliths and eoliths, how- 
ever ; and some of M. Rutot’s Belgian examples 
are now-a-days almost reckoned respect- 
able. Let us, nevertheless, inquire whether 
eoliths are not to be found nearer home. 
I can wish the reader no more delightful 
experience than to run down to Ightham in 
Kent, and pay a call on Mr. Benjamin Harri- 
son. In the room above what used to be Mr. 
Harriscn’s grocery-store, eoliths beyond all 
count are on view, which he has managed to 
amass in his rare moments of leisure. As he 
lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off 
their points, his enthusiasm is likely to prove 
catching. But the visitor, we shall suppose, 
is sceptical. Very good; it is not far, though 
a stiffish pull, to Ash on the top of the North 
Downs. Hereabouts are Mr. Harrison’s 


42 ANTHROPOLOGY 


hunting-grounds. Over these stony tracts he 
has conducted Sir Joseph Prestwich and Sir 
John Evans, to convince the one authority, 
but not the other. Mark this pebbly drift 
of rusty-red colour spread irregularly along 
the fields, as if the relics of some ancient 
stream or flood. On the surface, if you are 
lucky, you may pick up an unquestionable 
paleolith of early type, with the rusty-red 
stain of the gravel over it to show that it has 
lain there for ages. But both on and below 
the surface, the gravel being perhaps from five 
to seven feet deep, another type of stone 
occurs, the so-called eolith. Itis picked out 
from amongst ordinary stones partly because 
of its shape, and partly because of rough and 
much-worn chippings that suggest the hand of 
art or of nature, according to your turn of 
mind. Take one by itself, explains Mr. 
Harrison, and you will be sure to rank it 
as ordinary road-metal. But take a series 
together, and then, he urges, the sight of the 
same forms over and over again will persuade 
you in the end that human design, not aimless 
chance, has been at work here. 

Well, I must leave Mr. Harrison to convert 
you into the friend or foe of his eoliths, and 
will merely add a word in regard to the 
probable age of these eolith-bearing gravels. 
Sir Joseph Prestwich has tried to work the 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 43 


problem out. Now-a-days Kent and Sussex 
run eastwards in five more or less parallel 
ridges, not far short of 1,000 feet high, with 
deep valleys between. Formerly, however, 
no such valleys existed, and a great dome of 
chalk, some 2,500 feet high at its crown, 
perhaps, though others would say less, covered 
the whole country. That is why rivers like 
the Darenth and Medway cut clean through 
the North Downs and fall into the Thames, 
instead of flowing eastwards down the later 
valleys. They started to carve their channels 
in the soft chalk in the days gone by, when the 
watershed went north and south down the 
slopes of the great dome. And the red gravels 
with the eoliths in them, concludes Prestwich, 
must have come down the north slope whilst 
the dome was still intact; for they contain 
fragments of stone that hail from right across 
the present valleys. But, if the eoliths are 
man-made, then man presumably killed game 
and cut it up on top of the Wealden dome, 
how many years ago one trembles to think. 


Let us next proceed to the subject of 
paleoliths. There is, at any rate, no doubt 
about them. Yet, rather more than half a 
century ago, when Boucher de _ Perthes 
found palzeoliths in the gravels of the Somme 
at Abbeville, and was among the first to 


44 ANTHROPOLOGY 


recognize them for what they are, there was 
no small scandal. Now-a-days, however, the 
world takes it as a matter of course that those 
lumpish, discoloured, and much-rolled stones, 
shaped something like a pear, which come 
from the high terraces deposited by the 
Ancient Thames, were once upon a time 
the weapons or tools of somebody who had 
plenty of muscle in his arm. Plenty of skill 
he had in his fingers, too; for to chip a flint- 
pebble along both faces, till it takes a more 
or less symmetrical and standard shape, is not 
so easy as it sounds. Hammer away your- 
self at such a pebble, and see what a mess 
you make of it. To go back for one moment 
to the subject of eoliths, we may fairly argue 
that experimental forms still ruder than the 
much-trimmed paleoliths of the early river- 
drift must exist somewhere, whether Mr. 
Harrison’s eoliths are to be classed amongst 
them or not. Indeed, the Tasmanians of 
modern days carved their simple tools so. 
roughly, that any one ignorant of their 
history might easily mistake the greater 
number for common pieces of stone. On the 
other hand, as we move on from the earlier 
to the later types of river-drift implements, 
we note how by degrees practice makes 
perfect. The forms grow ever more regular 
and refined, up to the point of time which has 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN AS 


been chosen as the limit for the first of the 
three main stages into which the vast palzo- 
lithic epoch has to be broken up. The man 
of the tate St. Acheul period, as it is termed, 
was truly a great artist in his way. If you. 
stare vacantly at his handiwork in a museum, 
you are likely to remain cold to its charm. 
But probe about in a gravel-bed till you have 
the good fortune to light on a masterpiece; 
tenderly smooth away with your fingers the 
dirt sticking to its surface, and bring to view 
the tapering or oval outline, the straight edge, 
the even and delicate chipping over both 
faces; then, wrapping it carefully in your 
handkerchief, take it home to wash, and feast 
till bedtime on the clean feel and shining 
mellow colour of what is hardly more an 
implement than a gem. They took a pride 
in their work, did the men of old; and, until 
‘you can learn to sympathize, you are no 
anthropologist. 

During the succeeding main stage of the 
paleolithic epoch there was a decided set-back 
in the culture, as judged by the quality of the 
workmanship in flint. Those were the days 
of the Mousterians who dined off woolly 
rhinoceros in Jersey. Their stone implements, 
worked only on one face, are poor things by 
comparison with those of late St. Acheul days, 
though for a time degenerated forms of the 


46 ANTHROPOLOGY 


latter seem to have remained in use. What 
had happened? We can only guess. Prob- 
ably something to do with the climate was 
at the bottom of this change for the worse. 
Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age 
each big freeze was followed by an equally 
big flood, preceding each fresh return of milder 
weather. One of these floods, he thinks, 
must have drowned out the neat-fingered race 
of St. Acheul, and left the coast clear for the 
Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. 
Perhaps they were coarser in their physical 
type as well. 

To the credit of the Mousterians, however, 
must be set down the fact that they are 
associated with the habit of living in caves, 
and perhaps may even have started it; 
though some implements of the drift type 
occur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other 
caves, such as the famous Kent’s Cavern near 
Torquay. Climate, once more, has very 
possibly to answer for having thus driven man 
underground. Anyway, whether because they 


1 Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthal 
build. If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near 
Northfleet in Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the 
Thames when it was about ninety feet above its present 
level, is of early paleolithic date, as some good authorities 
believe, there was a kind of man away back in the drift- 
period who had a fairly high forehead and moderate 
brow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of 
humanity than our Mousterian friend of the large grinders. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN AT 


must, or because they liked it, the Mousterians 
went on with their cave life during an immense 
space of time, making little progress ; unless 
it weré to learn gradually how to sharpen 
bones into implements. But caves and bones 
alike were to play a far more striking part in 
the days immediately to follow. 

The third and last main stage of the palzo- 
lithic epoch developed by degrees into a 
golden age of art. But I cannot dwell on all 
its glories. I must pass by the beautiful work 
in flint; such as the thin blades of laurel-leaf 
pattern, fairly common in France but rare in 
England, belonging to the stage or type of 
culture known as the Solutrian (from Solutré 
in the department of Sadne-et-Loire). I 
must also pass by the exquisite French 
examples of the carvings or engravings of 
bone and ivory; a single engraving of a 
horse’s head, from the cave at Creswell Crags 
in Derbyshire, being all that England has to 
offer in this line. Any good museum can 
show you specimens or models of these delight- 
ful objects; whereas the things about which 
I am going to speak must remain hidden away 
for ever where their makers left them—lI mean 
the paintings and engravings on the walls of 
the French and Spanish caves. 

I invite you to accompany me in the spirit 
first of allto the cave of Gargas near Aventignan, 


48 ANTHROPOLOGY 


under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in the 
High Pyrenees. Half-way up a hil], in the 
midst of a wilderness of rocky fragments, the 
relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, down 
which we clamber into a spacious but low- 
roofed grotto, stretching back five hundred 
feet or so into infinite darkness. Hard by 
the mouth, where the light of day freely 
enters, are the remains of a hearth, with bone- 
refuse and discarded implements mingling 
with the ashes to a considerable depth. A 
glance at these implements, for instance the 
small flint scraper with narrow high back and 
perpendicular chipping along the sides, is 
enough to show that the men who once 
warmed their fingers here were of the so-called 
Aurignacian type (Aurignac in the department 
of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that 
is to say, lived somewhere about the dawn of 
the third stage of the palzolithic epoch. 
Directly after their disappearance nature 
would seem to have sealed up the cave again 
until our time, so that we can study them here 
all by themselves. 

Now let us take our lamps and explore the 
secrets of the interior. The icy torrents that 
hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away 
rounded alcoves along the sides. On the 
white surface of these, glazed over with a 
preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 49 


the outlines of many hands. Most of them 
are left hands, showing that the Aurignacians 
tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and 
dusted on the paint, black manganese or red 
ochre, between the outspread fingers in just 
the way that we, too, would find convenient. 
Curiously enough, this practice of stencilling 
hands upon the walls of caves is in vogue 
amongst the Australian natives; though, 
unfortunately, they keep the reason, if there is 
any deeper one than mere amusement, strictly 
to themselves. Like the Australians, again, 
and other rude peoples, these Aurignacians 
would appear to have been given to lopping 
off an occasional finger—-from some religious 
motive, we may guess—to judge from the 
mutilated look of a good many of the hand- 
prints. 

_ The use of paint is here limited to this class 
of wall-decoration. Buta sharp flint makes an 
excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian 
hunter is bent on reproducing by this means 
the forms of those game-animals about which 
he doubtless dreams night and day. His 
efforts in this direction, however, rather 
remind us of those of our infant-schools. 
Look at this bison. His snout is drawn 
sideways, but the horns branch out right and 
left as if in a full-face view. Again, our friend 
scamps details such as the legs. Sheer want 

D 


50 ANTHROPOLOGY 


of skill, we may suspect, leads him to construct 
what is more like the symbol of something 
thought than the portrait of something seen. 
And so we wander farther and farther into 
the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens 
to our pre-historic menagerie, including the 
rare find of a bird that looks uncommonly like 
the Great Auk. Mind, by the way, that you 
do not fall into that round hole in the floor. 
It is enormously deep; and more than forty 
cave-bears have left their skeletons at the 
bottom, amongst which your skeleton would 
be a little out of place. 

Next day let us move off eastwards to the 
Little Pyrenees to see another cave, Niaux, 
high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the 
top by former giaciers. This cave is about a 
mile deep; and it will take you half a mile 
of awkward groping amongst boulders and 

stalactites, not to mention a choke in one pari 
of the passage such as must puzzle a fat man, 
before the cavern becomes spacious, and you 
find yourself in the vast underground cathedral 
that pre-historic man has chosen for his picture- 
gallery. This was a later stock, that had in 
the meantime learnt how to draw to perfec- 
tion. Consider the bold black and white of 
that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing 
mane and tail, glossy barrel, and jolly snub- 
nosed face. It is four or five feet across, and 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 51 


not an inch of the work is out of scale. The 
same is true of nearly every one of the other 
fifty or more figures of game-animals. These 
artists could paint what they saw. 

_ Yet they could paint up on the walls what 
they thought, tco. There are likewise whole 
screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting 
for ever, to be interpreted. The dots and 
lines and pothooks clearly belong to a system 
of picture-writing. Can we make out their 
meaning at all? Once in a way, perhaps. 
Note these marks looking like two different 
kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are 
Australian weapons not unlike them. To the 
left of them are a lot of dots in what look like 
patterns, amongst which we get twice over the 
scheme of one dot in the centre of a circle 
of others.. Then, farther still to the left, 
comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to 
be more accurate, the front half is painted, the 
back being a piece of protruding rock that 
gives the effect of low relief. The bison is 
rearing back on its haunches, and there is a 
patch of red paint, like an open wound, just 
over the region of its heart. Let us try to 
read the riddle. It may well embody a charm 
that ran somewhat thus: ‘ With these 
weapons, and by these encircling tactics, may 
we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark ! ”’ 
Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile 


HaOF [bie LUBY 


52 ANTHROPOLOGY 


into the bowels of a mountain, to paint things 
up on the walls, did not do so merely for fun. 
This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most 
of us would not like to spend the night there 
alone; though I know a pre-historian who did. 
In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock- 
paintings of game-animals, not so lifelike as 
these of the old days, but symbolic almost 
beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn 
ceremonies whereby good hunting is held to 
be secured. Something of the sort, then, we 
may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave 
of Niaux. So, indeed, it was a cathedral after 
a fashion; and, having in mind the carven 
pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and 
side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the 
dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful 
lamps, I venture to question whether man 
has ever lifted up his heart in a grander 
one. 

Space would fail me if I now sought to 
carry you off to the cave of Altamira, near 
Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here 
you might see at its best a still later style of 
rock-painting, which deserts mere black and 
white for colour-shading of the most free 
description. Indeed, it is almost too free, m 
my judgment; for, though the control of the 
artist over his rude material is complete, 
he is inclined to turn his back on real life, 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 53 


forcing the animal forms into attitudes more 
striking than natural, and endowing their 
faces sometimes, as it seems to me, with 
almost human expressions. Whatever may 
be thought of the likelihood of these beasts 
being portrayed to look like men, certain it is 
that in the painted caves of this period the 
men almost invariably have animal heads, as 
if they were mythological beings, haif animal 
and half human; or else—as perhaps is more 
probable—masked dancers. At one place, 
however—namely, in the rock shelter of Cogul 
near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyre- 
nees, we have a picture of a group of women 
dancers who are not masked, but attired in 
the style of the hour. They wear high hats or 
chignons, tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts. 
Really, considering that we thus have a 
contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst 
there are likewise the numerous stencilled 
hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I have 
seen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy 
floor, hardened over with stalagmite, the 
actual print of a foot, we are brought very 
near to our palzolithic forerunners; though 
indefinite ages part them from us if we reckon 
by sheer time. 


Before ending this chapter, I have still to 
make good a promise to say something about 


54 ANTHROPOLOGY 


the neolithic men of western Europe. These 
people often, though not always, polished 
their stone; the paleolithic folk did not. 
That is the distinguishing mark by which 
the world is pleased to go. It would be fatal 
to forget, however, that, with this trifling 
difference, go many others which testify more 
clearly to the contrast between the older 
and newer types of culture. Thus it has 
still to be proved that the paleolithic races 
ever used pottery, or that they domesticated 
animals—for instance, the fat ponies which 
they were so fond of eating; or that they 
planted crops. All these things did the 
neolithic peoples sooner or later; so that it 
would not be strange if paleolithic man with- 
drew in their favour, because he could not 
compete. Pre-history is at present almost 
silent concerning the manner of his passing. 
In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, 
called Mas d’Azil, in the south of France, 
where the river Arize still bores its way 
through a mountain, some paleolithic folk 
seem to have lingered on in a sad state of 
decay. The old sureness of touch in the 
matter of carving bone had left them. Again, 
their painting was confined to the adorning of 
certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious 
objects, that perhaps are not without analogy 
in Australia, whilst something like them crops 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 55 


up again in the north of Scotland in what 
seems to bea very early period. Had the rest 
of the-palzolithic men already followed the 
reindeer and other arctic animals towards the 
north-east ? Or did the neolithic invasion, 
which came from the south, wipe out the lot ? 
Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may 
some of us have a little dose of paleolithic 
blood, as we certainly have a large dose of 
neolithic ? To all these questions it can only 
be replied that we do not yet know. 

No more do we know half as much as we 
should like about fifty things relating to the 
small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a 
language that has possibly left traces in the 
modern Basque, who spread over the west 
till they reached Great Britain—it probably 
was an island by this time—and erected the 
well-known long barrows and other monu- 
ments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; 
though not the round barrows, which are the 
work of a subsequent round-headed race of 
the bronze-age. Every day, however, the 
spade is adding to our knowledge. Besides, 
most of the ruder peoples of the modern 
world were at the neolithic stage of culture 
at the time of their discovery by Europeans. 
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, 
the pottery, the pile-dwellings, and so on, 
can be compared closely; and we have a 


=- 


56 ANTHROPOLOGY 


fresh instance of the way in which one branch 
of anthropology can aid another. | 

In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely 
pitching here and there on an illustrative 
point, I shall conclude by an excursion to 
Brandon, just on the Suffolk side of the border 
between that county and Norfolk. Here we 
can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic 
times and the other in the life of to-day. 
When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored in 
this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint- 
mines known as Grime’s Graves, he had to dig 
out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped 
pit some forty feet deep. Down at this level, 
it appeared, the neolithic worker had found 
the layer of the best flint. This he quarried 
by means of narrow galleries in all directions. 
For a pick he used a red-deer’s antler. In the 
British Museum is to be seen one of these with 
the miner’s thumb-mark stamped on a piece of 
clay sticking to the handle. His lamp was a 
cup of chalk. His ladder was probably a 
series of rough steps cut in the sides of the 
pit. As regards the use to which the material 
was put, a neolithic workshop was found just 
to the south of Grime’s Graves. Here, 
scattered about on all sides, were the cores, the 
hammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, 
scrapers, borers, spear-heads and arrow-heads 
galore, in all stages of manufacture. 


ANTIQUITY OF MAN 57 


Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far 
off, and what do we find? A family of the 
name Of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the 
same old method of mining. Their pits are of 
‘squarer shape than the neolithic ones, but 
otherwise similar. Their one-pronged pick 
retains the shape of the deer’s antler. Their 
light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk. And 
the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they 
call them, “ toes ”’ in the wall, five feet apart 
and connected by foot-holes. The miner 
simply jerks his load, several hundredweight 
of flints, from ledge to ledge by the aid of his 
head, which he protects with something that 
neolithic man was probably without, namely, 
an old bowler hat. He even talks a language 
of his own. “ Bubber-hutching on the sosh ”’ 
is the term for sinking a pit on the slant, and, 
for all we can tell, may have a very ancient 
pedigree. And what becomes of the miner’s 
output ? Itissold by the “ jag ’’—a jag being 
a pile just so high that when you stand on any 
side you can see the bottom flint on the other 
—to the knappers of Brandon. Any one of 
these—for instance, my friend Mr. Fred Snare 
—will, while you wait, break up a lump with a 
short round hammer into manageable pieces. 
Then, placing a “ quarter ”’ with his left hand 
on the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, 
with an oblong hammer, strike off flake after 


58 ANTHROPOLOGY 


flake, perhaps 1,500 in a morning; and finally 
will work these up into sharp-edged squares 
to serve as gun-flints for the trade with native 
Africa. Alas! the palmy days of knapping gun- 
flints for the British Army will never return 
to Brandon. Still, there must have been trade 
depression in those parts at any time from 
the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; 
for the strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny 
each, can have barely kept the wolf from the 
door. And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan 
but an artist. He has chipped out a flint 
ring, a feat which taxed the powers of the 
clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic 
Kgypt; whilst with one of his own flint fish- 
hooks he has taken a fine trout from the Little 
Ouse that runs by the town. 

Thus there are things in old England that 
are older even than some of our friends wot. 
In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the 
good flint—so rich in colour as it is, and so 
responsive to the hammer, at any rate if you 
get down to the lower layers or “‘ sases,”’ for 
instance, the floorstone, or the black smooth- 
stone that is generally below water-level—has 
served the needs of all the paleolithic periods, 
and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise 
of the modern Englishmen who fought with 
flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently 
took out tinder-boxes with them to the war 


RACE 59 


in South Africa. And what does this stand 
for in terms of the antiquity of man? 
Thousands of years? We do not know 
exactly; but say rather hundreds of thou- 
gands of years. 


CHAPTER III 
RACE 


THERE is a story about the British sailor 
who was asked to state what he understood by 
a Dago. “ Dagoes,”’ he replied, “‘ is anything 
wot isn’t our sort of chaps.” In exactly the 
same way would an ancient Greek have 
explained what he meant by a “ barbarian.”’ 
- When it takes this wholesale form we speak, 
not without reason, of race-prejudice. We 
may well wonder in the meantime how far this 
prejudice answers to something real. Race 
would certainly seem to be a fact that stares 
one in the face. 

Stroll down any London street : you cannot 
go wrong about that Hindu student with 
features rather like ours but of a darker shade. 
The short dapper man with eyes a little aslant 
is no less unmistakably a Japanese. It takes 
but a slightly more practised eye to pick out 


60 ANTHROPOLOGY 


the German waiter, the French chauffeur, and 
the Italian vendor of ices. Lastly, when you 
have made yourself really good at the game, 
you will be searcely more likely to confuse 
a small dark Welshman with a broad florid 
Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff. 

Yes, but remember that you are judging by 
the gross impression, not by the element of 
race or breed as distinguished from the rest. 
Here, you say, come a couple of our American 
cousins. Perhaps it is their speech that 
bewrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general 
cut of their jib. If you were to go into their 
actual pedigrees, you would find that the one 
had a Scotch father and a mother from out of 
Dorset; whilst the other was partly Scandi- 
navian and partly Spanish with a tincture of 
Jew. Yet to all intents and purposes they 
form one type. And, the more deeply you go 
into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out 
to be, when breed, and breed alone, is the 
subject of inquiry. Yet race, in the only 
sense that the word has for an anthropologist, 
means inherited breed, and nothing more or 
less—inherited breed, and all that it covers, 
whether bodily or mental features. 

For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably 
extends to mind as well as to body. It is not 
merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red 
Indian with the vivacious Negro; or the phleg- 


RACE 61 


matic Dutchman with the passionate Italian. 
True, you say, but what about the influence 
of their various climates, or again of their 
different ideals of behaviour? Quite so. It 
is immensely difficult to separate the effects 
of the various factors. Yet surely the race- 
factor counts for something in the mental 
constitution. Any breeder of horses will tell 
you that neither the climate of Newmarket, 
nor careful training, nor any quantity of oats, 
nor anything else, will put racing mettle into 
cart-horse stock. 

In what follows, then, I shall try to show 
just what the problem about the race-factor 
is, even if I have to trespass a little way into 
general biology in order to do sot. And I 
shall not attempt to conceal the difficulties 
relating to the race-problem. I know that 
the ordinary reader is supposed to prefer that 
all the thinking should be done beforehand, 
and merely the results submitted to him. But 
I cannot believe that he would find it edifying 
to look at half-a-dozen books upon the races 
of mankind, and find half-a-dozen accounts 
of their relationships, having scarcely a single 
statement in common. Far better face the 
fact that race still baffles us almost completely. 


1 The reader is advised to consult also the more compre- 
hensive study on Lvolution by Professors Geddes and 
Thomson in this series. 


62 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Yet, breed is there; and, in its own time and in 
its own way, breed will out. 

Race or breed was a moment ago described 
as a factor in human nature. But to break 
up human nature into factors is something 
that we can do, or try to do, in thought only. 
In practice we can never succeed in doing any- 
thing of the kind. A machine such as a watch 
we can take to bits and then put together 
again. Even a chemical compound such as 
water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen 
and then reproduce out of its elements. But 
to dissect a living thing is to kill it once and 
for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, 
is something unique, with the unique property 
of being able to evolve. As life evolves, that 
is to say changes, by being handed on from 
certain forms to certain other forms, a partial 
rigidity marks the process together with a 
partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so 
to speak, that keeps the life-force up to a 
point true to its old direction ; though, short of 
that limit, it is free to take a new line of its 
own. Race, then, stands for the stiffening 
in the evolutionary process. Just up to what 
point it goes in any given case we probably 
can never quite tell. Yet, if we could think 
our way anywhere near tothat point in regard 
to man, I doubt not that we should eventually 
succeed in forging a fresh instrument for con- 


RACE 63 


trolling the destinies of our species, an instru- 
ment perhaps more powerful than education 
itself{—I mean, eugenics, the art of improving 
the human breed. 

To see what race means when considered 
apart, let us first of all take your individual 
self, and ask how you would proceed to 
separate your inherited nature from the nature 
which you have acquired in the course of living 
your life. It is not easy. ‘Suppose, however, 
that you had a twin brother born, if indeed that 
were possible, as like you as one pea is like 
another. An accident in childhood, however, 
has caused him to lose a leg. So he becomes 
a clerk, living a sedentary life in an office. 
You, on the other hand, with your two lusty 
legs to help you, become a postman, always 
ontherun. Well, the two of you are now very 
different men in looks and habits. He is pale 
and you are brown. You play football and 
he sits at home reading. Nevertheless, any 
friend who knows you both intimately will 
discover fifty little things that bespeak in you 
the same underlying nature and bent. You 
are both, for instance, slightly colour-blind, 
and both inclined to fly into violent passions 
on occasion. That is your common inherit- 
ance peeping out—if, at least, your friend has 
really managed to make allowance for your 
common bringing-up, which might mainly 


64 ANTHROPOLOGY 


account for the passionateness, though hardly 
for the colour-blindness. 

But now comes the great difficulty. Let 
us further suppose that you two twins marry 
wives who are also twins born as like as two 
peas; and each pair of you has a family. 
Which of the two batches of children will tend 
on the whole to have the stronger legs ? Your 
legs are strong by use; your brother’s are weak 
by disuse. But do use and disuse make any 
difference to the race ? That is the theoretical 
question which, above all others, complicates 
and hampers our present-day attempts to 
understand heredity. 

In technical language, this is the problem 
of use-inheritance, otherwise known as the 
inheritance of acquired characters. It is apt 
to seem obvious to the plain man that the 
effects of use and disuse are transmitted to 
offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who 
half a century before Darwin propounded a 
theory of the origin of species that was equally 
evolutionary in its way. Why does the 
giraffe have so long a neck? Lamarck 
thought it was because the giraffe had acquired 
a habit of stretching his neck out. Every 
time there was a bad season, the giraffes must 
all stretch up as high as ever they could 
towards the leafy tops of the trees; and the 
one that stretched up farthest survived, and 


KK 


RACE 65 


handed on the capacity for a like feat to his 
fortunate descendants. Now Darwin himself 
was ready to allow that use and disuse might 
have some influence on the offspring’s inherit- 
ance; but he thought that this influence was 
small as compared with the influence of what, 
~ for want of a better term, he called spontaneous 
variation. Certain of his followers, however, 
who call themselves Neo-Darwinians, are 
ready to go one better. Led by the German 
biologist, Weismann, they would thrust the 
Lamarckians, with their hypothesis of use-in- 
heritance, clean out of the field. Spontaneous 
variation, they assert, is all that is needed to 
prepare the way for the selection of the tall 
_ giraffe. It happened to be born that way. 
In other words, its parents had it in them to 
breed it so. This is not a theory that tells one 
anything positive. It is merely a caution to 
look away from use and disuse to another 
explanation of variation that is not yet forth- 
coming. 

After all, the plain man must remember 
that the effects of use and disuse, which he 
seems to see everywhere about him, are mixed 
up with plenty of apparent instances to the 
contrary. He will smile, perhaps, when I tell 
him that Weismann cut off the tails of endless 
mice, and, breeding them together, found that 


tails invariably decorated the race as before. 
E 


66 ANTHROPOLOGY 


I remember hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw com- 
ment on this experiment. He was defending 
the Lamarckianism of Samuel Butler, who 
declared that our heredity was a kind of race- 
memory, a lapsed intelligence. ‘‘ Why,’’ said 
Mr. Shaw, “did the mice continue to grow 
tails ? Because they never wanted to have 
them cut off.” But men-folk are wont to 
shave off their beards because they want to 
have them off; and, amongst people more 
conservative in their habits than ourselves, 
such a custom may persist through numberless 
generations. Yet who ever observed the 
slightest signs of beardlessness being produced 
in this way ? On the other hand, there are 
beardless as well as bearded races in the world; 
and, by crossing them, you could, doubtless, 
soon produce ups and downs in the razor-trade. __ 
Only, as Weismann’s school would say, the \ 
required variation is in this case spontaneous, | 
that is, comes entirely of its own accord. 
Leaving the question of use-inheritance 
open, I pass on to say a word about variation 
as considered in itself and apart from this 
doubtful influence. Weismann holds that 
organisms resulting from the union of two 
cells are more variable than those produced 
out of a single one. On this view, variation 
depends largely on the laws of the inter- 
action of the dissimilar characters brought 


\ 


RACE 67 


together in cell-union. But what are these 
laws? The best that can be said is that 
we are getting to know a little more about 
them every day. Amongst other lines of 
inquiry, the so-called Mendelian experi- 
ments promise to clear up much that is at 
present dark. 

The development of the individual that 
results from such cell-union is no mere mix- 
ture or addition, but a process of selective 
organization. To put it very absurdly, one 
does not find a pair of two-legged parents 
having a child with legs as big as the two sets 
of legs together, or with four legs, two of them 
of one shape and two of another. In other 
words, of the possibilities contributed by the 
father and mother, some are taken and some 
are left in the case of anyonechild. Further, 
different children will represent different 
selections from amongst the germinal elements. 
Mendelism, by the way, is especially concerned 
to. find out the law according to which the 
different types of organization are distributed 
between the offspring. Each child, mean- 
while, is a unique individual, a living whole 
with an organization of its very own. This 
means that its constituent elements form a 
system. ‘They stand to each other in relations 
of mutual'support. In short, life is possible 
because there is balance. 


68 ANTHROPOLOGY 


This general state of balance, however, is 
able to go along with a lot of special balancings 
that seem largely independent of each other. 
It is important to remember this when we 
come a little later on to consider the instincts. 
All sorts of lesser systems prevail within the 
larger system represented by the individual 
organism. It is just as if within the state with 
its central government there were a number 
of county councils, municipal corporations, 
and so on, each of them enjoying a certain 
measure of self-government on its own account. 
Thus we can see in a very general way how 
it is that so much variation is possible. The 
selective organization, which from amongst 
the germinal elements precipitates ever so 
many and different forms of fresh life, is so 
loose and elastic that a working arrangement 
between the parts can be reached in all sorts 
of directions. The lesser systems are so far 
self-governing that they can be _ trusted 
to get along in almost any combination; 
though of course some combinations are 
naturally stronger and more stable than the 
rest, and hence tend to outlast them, or, 
as the phrase goes, to be preserved by natural 
selection. 

It is time to take account of the principle 
of natural selection. We have done with the 
subject of variation. Whether use and disuse 


RACE 69 


have helped to shape the fresh forms of life, 
or whether these are purely spontaneous com- 
binations that have come into being on what 
we are pleased to call their own account, at 
any rate let us take them as given. What 
happens now ? At this point begins the work 
of natural selection. Darwin’s great achieve- 
ment was to formulate this law; though it is 
only fair to add that it was discovered by 
A. R. Wallace at the same moment. Both of 
them got the first hint of it from Malthus. 
This English clergyman, writing about half 
a century earlier, had shown that the growth 
of population is apt very considerably to out- 
strip the development of food-supply ; where- 
upon natural checks such as famine or war 
must, he argued, ruthlessly intervene so as 
to redress the balance. Applying these con- 
siderations to the plant and animal kingdoms 
at large, Darwin and Wallace perceived that, 
of the multitudinous forms of life thrust out 
upon the world to get a livelihood as best they 
could, a vast quantity must be weeded out. 
Moreover, since they vary exceedingly in their 
type of organization, it seemed reasonable to 
suppose that, of the competitors, those who 
were innately fitted to make the best of the 
ever-changing circumstances would outlive 
the rest. An appeal to the facts fully bore 
out this hypothesis. It must not, indeed, be 


70 ANTHROPOLOGY 


thought that all the weeding out which goes on 
favours the fittest. Accidents will always 
happen. On the whole, however, the type 
that is most at home under the surrounding 
conditions, it may be because it is more com- 
plex, or it may be because it is of simpler 
organization, survives the rest. 

Now to survive is to survive to breed. If 
you live to eighty, and have no children, you 
do not survive in the biological sense; whereas 
your neighbour who died at forty may survive 
in a numerous progeny. Natural selection 
is always in the last resort between individuals ; 
because individuals are alone competent to 
breed. At the same time, the reason for the 
individual’s survival may he very largely -out- 
side him. Amongst the bees, for instance, a 
non-working type of insect survives to breed 
because the sterile workers do their duty by 
the hive. So, too, that other social animal, 
man, carries on the race by means of some 
whom others die childless in order to preserve. 
Nevertheless, breeding being a strictly individ- 
ual and personal affair, there is always a risk 
lest a society, through spending its best too 
freely, end by recruiting its numbers from 
those in whom the engrained capacity to 
render social service is weakly developed. To 
rear a goodly family must always be the first 
duty of unselfish people; for otherwise the 


RACE | 71 


spirit of unselfishness can hardly be kept alive 
in the world. 

- Enough about heredity as a condition of 
evolution. Wereturn, with a better chance of 
distinguishing them, to the consideration of the 
special effects that it brings about. It was 
said just now that heredity is the stiffening in 
human nature, a stiffening bound up with a 
more or less considerable offset of plasticity. 
Now clearly it is in some sense true that the 
child’s whole nature, its modicum of plasticity 
included, is handed on from its parents. Our 
business in this chapter, however, is on the 
whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic 
side of the inherited life-force. The more or 
less rigid, definite, systematized characters— 
these form the hereditary factor, the race. 
Now none of these are ever quite fixed. <A 
certain measure of plasticity has to be counted 
in as part of their very nature. Even in the 
bee, with its highly definite instincts, there is 
a certain flexibility bound up with each of 
these; so that, for instance, the inborn faculty 
of building up the comb regularly is modified 
if the hive happens to be of an awkward shape. 
Yet, as compared with what remains over, the 
characters that we are able to distinguish 
as racial must show fixity. Unfortunately, 
habits show fixity too. Yet habits belong to 
the plastic side of our nature ; for, in forming a 


72 ANTHROPOLOGY 


habit, we are plastic at the start, though 
hardly so once we have let ourselves go. 
Habits, then, must be discounted in our search 
for the hereditary bias in our lives. It is no 
use trying to disguise the difficulties attending 
an inquiry into race. 


These difficulties notwithstanding, in the 
rest of this chapter let us consider a few of 
what are usually taken to be racial features of 
man. As before, the treatment must be 
illustrative; we cannot work through the list. 
Further, we must be content with a very rough 
division into bodily and mental features. 
Just at this point we shall find it very hard to 
say what is to be reckoned bodily and what 
mental. Leaving these niceties to the philo- 
sophers, however, let us go ahead as best we 
can. 

Oh for an external race-mark about which 
there could be no mistake! That has always 
been a dream of the anthropologist; but it is 
a dream that shows no signs of coming true. 
All sorts of tests of this kind have been sug- 
gested. Cranium, cranial sutures, frontal 
process, nasal bones, eye, chin, jaws, wisdom 
teeth, hair, humerus, pelvis, the heart-line 
across the hand, calf, tibia, heel, colour, and 
even smell—all these external signs, as well as 
many more, have been thought, separately 


RACE 73 


or together, to afford the crucial test of a man’s 
pedigree. Clearly I cannot here cross-examine 
the entire crowd of claimants, were I even 
competent to do so. I shall, therefore, say a 
few words about two, and two only, namely, 
head-form and colour. 

I believe that, if the plain man were to ask 
himself how, in walking down a London street, 
he distinguished one racial type from another, 
he would find that he chiefly went by colour. 
In a general way he knows how to make 
allowance for sunburn and get down to the 
native complexion underneath. But, if he 
went off presently to a museum and tried to 
apply his test to the pre-historic men on view 
there, it would fail for the simple reason that 
long ago they left their skins behind them. 
He would have to get to work, therefore, on 
their bony parts, and doubtless would attack 
the skulls for choice. By considering head- 
form and colour, then, we may help to cover a 
certain amount of the ground, vast as it is. 
For remember that anthropology in this 
department draws no line between ancient and 
modern, or between savage and civilized, but 
tries to tackle every sort of man that comes 
within its reach. 

Head-shape is really a far more complicated 
thing to arrive at for purposes of comparison 
than one might suppose. Since no part of 


TA ANTHROPOLOGY 


the skull maintains a stable position in regard 
to the rest, there can be no fixed standard of 
measurement, but at most a judgment of like- 
ness or unlikeness founded on an averaging of 
the total proportions. Thus it comes about 
that, in the last resort, the impression of a good 
expert is worth in these matters a great deal 
more than rows of figures. Moreover, rows 
of figures in their turn take a lot of under- 
standing. Besides, they are not always easy 
to get. This is especially the case if you 
are measuring a live subject. Perhaps he is 
armed with a club, and may take amiss the 
use of an instrument that has to be poked 
into his ears, or what not. So, for one reason 
or another, we have often to put up with that 
very unsatisfactory single-figure description 
of the head-form which is known as the cranial 
index. You take the greatest length and 
greatest breadth of the skull, and write down 
the result obtained by dividing the former 
into the latter when multiplied by 100. 
Medium-headed people have an index of 
anything between 75 and 80. Below that 
figure men rank as long-headed, above it as 
round-headed. This test, however, as I have 
hinted, will not by itself carry us far. On 
the other hand, I believe that a good judge 
of head-form in all its aspects taken together 
will generally be able to make a pretty shrewd 


RACE 75 


guess as to the people amongst whom the 
owner of a given skull is to be placed. 
Unfortunately, to say people is not to say 
race. It may be that a given people tend to 
~ have.a characteristic head-form, not so much 
because they are of common breed, as because 
they are subjected after birth, or at any rate 
after conception, to one and the same environ- 
ment. Thus some careful observations made 
recently by Professor Boas on American immi- 
grants from various parts of Europe seem to 
show that the new environment does in some 
unexplained way modify the head-form to a 
remarkable extent. For example, amongst 
the East European Jews the head of the 
Kuropean-born is shorter and wider than that 
of the American-born, the difference being 
even more marked in the second generation 
of the American-born. At the same time, 
other European nationalities exhibit changes 
of other kinds, all these changes, however, 
being in the direction of a convergence towards 
one and the same American type. How are 
we to explain these facts, supposing them to be 
corroborated by more extensive studies? It 
would seem that we must at any rate allow for 
a considerable plasticity in the head-form, 
whereby it is capable of undergoing decisive 
alteration under the influences of environment; 
not, of course, at any moment during life, but 


76 ANTHROPOLOGY 


during those early days when the growth of 
the head is especially rapid. The further 
question whether such an acquired character 
can be transmitted we need not raise again. 
Before passing on, however, let this one word 
to the wise be uttered. If the skull can be so | 
affected, then what about the brain inside 
it? Ifthe hereditarily long-headed can change 
under suitable conditions, then what about 
the hereditarily short-witted ? 

It remains to say a word about the types 
of pre-historic men as judged by their bony 
remains and especially by their skulls. Natur- 
ally the subject bristles with uncertainties. 

By itself stands the so-called Pithecanthro- 
pus (Ape-man) of Java, a regular “ missing 
link.’? The top of the skull, several teeth, and 
a thigh-bone, found at a certain distance from 
each other, are all that we have of it or him. 
Dr. Dubois, their discoverer, has made out a 
fairly strong case for supposing that the geo- 
logical stratum in which the remains occurred 
is Pliocene—that is to say, belongs to the 
Tertiary epoch, to which man has not yet 
been traced back with any strong probability. 
It must remain, however, highly doubtful 
whether this is a proto-human being, or merely 
an ape of a type related to the gibbon. The 
intermediate character is shown especially 
in the head form. If an ape, Pithecanthropus 


RACE 77 


had an enormous brain; if a man, he must 
have verged on what we should consider 
idiocy. 

Also standing somewhat by itself is the 
Heidelberg man. All that we have of him is 
a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It 
was found more than eighty feet below the 
surface of the soil, in company with animal 
remains that make it possible to fix its position 
in the scale of pre-historic periods with some 
accuracy. Judged by this test, it is as old as 
the oldest of the unmistakable drift imple- 
ments, the so-called Chellean (from Chelles 
in the department of Seine-et-Marne in 
France). The jaw by itself would suggest a 
gorilla, being both chinless and immensely 
powerful. The teeth, however, are human 
beyond question, and can be matched, or 
perhaps even in respect to certain marks of 
primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient 
skulls of the Neanderthal order, if not also 
amongst modern ones from Australia. 

We may next consider the Neanderthal 
group of skulls, so named after the first of that 
type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley 
close to Diisseldorf in the Rhine basin. A 
narrow head, with low and retreating forehead, 
and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at 
least twice the brain capacity of any gorilla, 
set the learned world disputing whether this 


78 ANTHROPOLOGY 


was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It 
was unfortunate that there were no proofs to 
hand of the age of these relics. After a while, 
however, similar specimens began to come in. 
Thus in 1866 the jaw of a woman, displaying a 
tendency to chinlessness combined with great 
strength, was found in the Cave of La Nau- 
lette in Belgium, associated with more or less 
dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly 
rhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, 
though its importance was not appreciated 
at the moment, there had been discovered, 
near Forbes’ quarry at Gibraltar, the famous 
Gibraltar skull, now to be seen in the Museum 
of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. 
Any visitor will notice at the first glance that 
this isno man ofto-day. There are the narrow 
head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge 
as before, supplemented by the most extra- 
ordinary eye-holes that were ever seen, vast 
circles widely separated from each other. And 
other peculiar features will reveal themselves 
on a close inspection; for instance, the horse- 
shoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are 
arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the 
face due to the absence of the depressions that 
in our own case run down on each side from 
just outside the nostrils hie the corners 
of the mouth. 

And now at the present time we have twenty 


RACE 79 


or more individuals of this Neanderthal type 
to compare. The latest discoveries are per- 
haps the most interesting, because in two and 
_ perhaps other cases the man has been properly 
buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in 
the French department of Corréze, a skeleton, 
which in its head-form closely recalls the 
Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in 
the floor of a low grotto. It lay on its back, 
head to the west, with one arm bent towards 
the head, the other outstretched, and the legs 
drawn up. Some bison bones lay in the grave 
as if a food-offering had been made. Hard 
by were flint implements of a well-marked 
Mousterian type. In the shelter of Le Mou- 
stier itself a similar burial was discovered. 
The body lay on its right side, with the right 
arm bent so as to support the head upon a 
carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the 
left arm was stretched out, so that the hand 
might be near a magnificent oval stone-weapon 
chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by 
design. So much for these men of the Nean- 
derthal type, denizens of the mid-palzolithic 
world at the very latest. Ape-like they 
doubtless are in their head-form up to a certain 
point, though almost all their separate fea- 
tures occur here and there amongst modern 
Australian natives. And yet they were men 
enough, had brains enough, to believe in a 


80 ANTHROPOLOGY 


life after death. There is something to think 
about in that. 

Without going outside Europe, we have, 
however, to reckon with at least two other 
types of very early head-form. 

In one of the caves of Mentone known as 
La Grotte des Enfants two skeletons from a 
low stratum were of a primitive type, but 
unlike the Neanderthal, and have been 
thought to show affinities to the modern 
negro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes 
are indisputably forthcoming either from 
Kurope or from any other part of the 
world, there is little at present to be made 
out about this interesting racial type. 

In the layer immediately above the negroid- 
remains, however, as well as in other caves at 
Mentone, were the bones of individuals of 
quite another order, one being positively a 
giant. They are known as the Cro-Magnon 
race, after a group of them discovered in a rock 
shelter of that name on the banks of the 
Vezére. These particular people can be 
shown to be Aurignacian—that is to say, to 
have lived just after the Mousterian men of 
the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, 
as has been already suggested, the Galley 
Hall individual, who shows affinities to the 
Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift- 
period, then we can believe that from very 


RACE 81 


early times there co-existed in Kurope at least 
two varieties; and these so distinct, that some 
authorities would trace the original divergence 
between them right back to the times before 
’ man and the apes had parted company, link- 
ing the Neanderthal race with the gorilla and 
the Cro-Magnon race with the orang. The 
Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly 
developed. The forehead is high, and the 
chin shapely, whilst neither the brow-ridge 
nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neander- 
thal type. Whether this race survives in 
modern Europe is, as was said in the last 
' chapter, highly uncertain. Incertain respects 
—for instance, in a certain shortness of face— 
these people present exceptional features; 
though some think they can still find men of 
this type in the Dordogne district. Perhaps 
the chances are, however, considering how 
skulls of the neolithic period prove to be any- 
thing but uniform, and suggest crossings 
between different stocks, that we may claim 
kinship to some extent with the more good- 
looking of the two main types of palzolithic 
man—always supposing that head-form can 
be taken as a guide. But can it? The 
Pygmies of: the Congo region have medium 
heads; the Bushmen of South Africa, usually 
regarded. as akin in race, have long heads. 


The American Indians, generally supposed to 
F 


82 ANTHROPOLOGY 


be all, or nearly all, of one racial type, show 
considerable differences of head-form; and so 
on. It need not be repeated that any race- 
mark is liable to deceive. 


We have sufficiently considered the use to 
which the particular race-mark of head-form 
has been put in the attempted classification of 
the very early men who have left their bones 
behind them. Let us now turn to another 
race-mark, namely colour; because, though it 
may really be less satisfactory than others, 
for instance hair, that is the one to which 
ordinary people naturally turn when they 
seek to classify by races. the present: inhabit- 
ants of the earth. 

When Linngeus in pre-Darwinian, days 
distinguished four varieties of man, the white 
European, the red American, the yellow 
Asiatic, and the black African, he did not 
dream of providing the basis of anything more 
than an artificial classification. He probably 
would have agreed with Buffon in saying that 
in every case it was one and the same kind of 
man, only dyed differently by the different 
climates. But the Darwinian is searching for 
a natural classification. He wants to dis- 
tinguish men according to their actual descent. 
Now race and descent mean for him the same 
thing. Hence a race-mark, if one is to be 


RACE 83 


found, must stand for, by co-existing with, 
the whole mass of properties that form the 
inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark 
in this profound sense? That is the only 
question here. 

First of all, what is the use of being 
eoloured one way orthe other? Does it make 
any difference? Is it something, like the 
heart-line of the hand, that may go along with 
useful qualities, but in itself seems to be a 
meaningless accident? Well, as some un- 
fortunate people will be able to tell you, 
colour is still a formidable handicap in the 
struggle for existence. Not to consider the 
colour-prejudice in other aspects, there is no 
gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selection 
at this hour. The lower animals appear to 
be guided in the choice of a mate by externals 
of a striking and obvious sort. And men and 
women to this day marry more with their eyes 
than with their heads. 

The coloration of man, however, though it 
may have come to subserve the purposes of 
mating, does not seem in its origin to have 
been like the bright coloration of the male bird. 
It was not something wholly useless save as a 
means of sexual attraction, though in such a 
capacity useful because a mark of vital vigour. 
Colour almost certainly developed in strict 
relation to climate. Right away in the back 


84 ANTHROPOLOGY 


ages we must place what Bagehot has called 
the race-making epoch, when the chief bodily 
differences, including differences of colour, 
arose amongst men. In those days, we may 
suppose, natural selection acted largely on the 
body, because mind had not yet become the 
prime condition of survival. The rest is a 
question of prehistoric geography. Within 
the tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, 
and presumably of the earliest men, a black 
skin protects against sunlight. A white skin, 
on the other hand—though this is more 
doubtful—perhaps économizes sun-heat in 
colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so- 
called red are intermediate tints suitable to 
intermediate regions. It is not hard to plot 
out in the pre-historic map of the world geo- 
graphical provinces, or “‘ areas of characteriza- 
tion,’? where races of different shades corre- 
sponding to differences in the climate might 
develop, in an isolation more or less complete, 
such as must tend to reinforce the process of 
differentiation. 

Let it not be forgotten, however, that indi- 
vidual plasticity plays its part too in the deter- 
mination of humancolour. The Anglo-Indian 
planter is apt to return from a long sojourn 
in the East with his skin charged with a dark 
pigment which no application of soap will 
remove during the rest of his life. It would be 


RACE 85 


interesting to conduct experiments, on the 
lines of those of Professor Boas already men- 
tioned, with the object of discovering in what 
degree the same capacity for amassing pro- 
tective pigment declares itself in children of 
Kuropean parentage born in the tropics or 
transplanted thitner during infancy. Corre- 
spondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to 
bleach in cold countries needs to be studied. 
In the background, too, lurks the question 
whether such effects of individual plasticity 
can be transmitted to offspring, and become 
part of the inheritance. 

One more remark upon the subject of colour. 
Now-a-days civilized peoples, as well as many 
of the ruder races that the former govern, wear 
clothes. In other words they have dodged 
the sun, by developing, with the aid of mind, 
a complex society that includes the makers 
of white drill suits and solar helmets. But, 
under such conditions, the colour of one’s skin 
becomes more or less of aluxury. Protective 
pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for 
little as compared with capacity for social 
service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its 
vital function. Will it therefore tend to 
disappear? In the long run, it would seem 
-—perhaps only in the very long run—it will 
become dissociated from that general fitness 
to survive under particular climatic conditions 


86 ANTHROPOLOGY 


of which it was once the innate mark. Be this 
as it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely 
founded on sheer considerations of colour, is 
bound to decay, if and when the races of 
darker colour succeed in displaying, on the 
average, such qualities of mind as will enable 
them to compete with the whites on equal 
terms, in a world which is coming more and 
more to include all climates. 


Thus we are led on to discuss race in its 
mental aspect. Here, more than ever, we are 
all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What 
is to be the test of mind ? Indeed, mind and 
plasticity are almost the same thing. Race, 
therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolu- 
tion of life, might seem by its very nature 
opposed to mind as a limiting or obstructing 
force. Are we, then, going to return to the 
old pre-scientific notion of soul as something 
alien to body, and thereby simply clogged, 
thwarted and dragged down? That would 
never do. Body and soul are, for the working 
purposes of science, to be conceived as in 
perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of 
life, and as such subject to a common develop- 
ment. Heredity, then, must be assumed to 
apply to both equally. In proportion as there 
is plastic mind there will be plastic body. 

Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body 


RACE 87 


is likewise the hardest to observe, at any rate 
whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. No cer- 
tain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be 
available from this quarter. You will see it 
stated, for instance, that the size of the brain 
cavity will serve to mark off one race from 
another. This is extremely doubtful, to put 
it mildly. No doubt the average European 
shows some advantage in this respect as com- 
pared, say, with the Bushman. But then you 
have to write off so much for their respective 
types of body, a bigger body going in general 
with a bigger head, that in the end you find 
yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, 
the European may be the first to ery off on 
the ground that comparisons are odious; for 
some specimens of Neanderthal man in sheer 
size of the brain cavity are said to give points 
to any of our modern poets and politicians. 
Clearly, then, something is wrong with this 
test. Nor, if the brain itself be examined after 
death, and the form and number of its con- 
volutions compared, is this criterion of heredi- 
tary brain-power any more satisfactory. It 
might be possible in this way to detect the 
difference between an idiot and a person of 
normal intelligence, but not the difference 
- between a fool and a genius. 

We cross the uncertain line that divides the 
bodily from the mental when we subject the 


88 ANTHROPOLOGY 


same problem of hereditary mental endow- 
ment to the methods of what is known as 
experimental psychology. Thus acuteness of 
sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are 
measured by various ingenious devices. See- 
ing what stories travellers bring back with 
them about the hawk-like vision of hunting 
races, one might suppose that such compari- 
sons would be all in their favour. The 
Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, how- 
ever, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader, 
included several well-trained psychologists, 
who devoted special attention to this subject; 
and their results show that the sensory powers 
of these rude folk were on the average much 
the same as those of Europeans. It is the 
hunter’s experience only that enables him 
to sight the game at an immense distance. 
There are a great many more complicated 
tests of the same type designed to estimate 
the force of memory, attention, association, 
reasoning and other faculties that most people 
would regard as purely mental ; whilst another 
set of such tests deals with reaction to 
stimulus, co-ordination between hand and eye, 
fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps 
of all, emotional excitement as shown through 
the respiration—phenomena which are, as it 
were, mental and bodily at once and together. 
Unfortunately, psychology cannot distinguish 


RACE 89 


in such cases between the effects of heredity 
and those of individual experience, whether 
it take the form of high culture or of a dissi- 
_ pated life. Indeed, the purely temporary 
condition of body and mind is apt to influence 
the results. A man has been up late, let us 
say, or has been for a long walk, or has missed 
a meal; obviously his reaction-times, his 
record for memory, and so on, will show a 
difference for the worse. Or, again, the sub- 
ject may confront the experiment in very 
various moods. At one moment he may be 
_ full of vanity, anxious to show what superior 
qualities he possesses; whilst at another time 
he will be bored. Not to labour the point 
further, these methods, whatever they may 
become in the future, are at present unable to 
afford any criterion whatever of the mental 
ability that goes with race. They are fertile 
in statistics; but an interpretation of these 
statistics that furthers our purpose is still to 
seek. 

But surely, it will be said, we can tell an 
instinct when we come across it, so uniform as 
it is, and so independent of the rest of the 
system. Not at all. For one thing, the idea 
that an instinct is a piece of mechanism, as 
fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is 
now known to be highly plastic in many cases, 
to vary considerably in individuals, and to 


90 ANTHROPOLOGY 


involve conscious processes, thought, feeling 
and will, at any rate of an elementary kind ? 
Again, how are you going to isolate an instinct? 
Those few automatic responses to stimulation 
that appear shortly after birth, as, for im- 
stance, sucking, may perhaps be recognized, 
since parental training and experience im 
general are out of the question here. But 
what about the instinct or group of instincts 
answering to sex? This is latent until a 
stage of life when experience is already in ‘full 
swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busy 
discussing whether man has very few instincts. 
or whether, on the contrary, he appears ‘to 
have few because he really has so many that, 
in practice, they keep interfering with one 
another allthe time. In support of the latter 
view, it has been recently suggested by Mr. 
McDougall that the best test of the instincts 
that we have is to be found in the specific 
emotions. He believes that every instinctive 
process consists of an afferent part or message, 
a central part, and an efferent part or dis- 
charge. At its two ends the process is highly 
plastic. Message and discharge, to which 
thought and will correspond, are modified 
in their type as experience matures. The 
central part, on the other hand, to which emo- 
tion answers on the side of consciousness, 
remains for ever much the same. To fear, to 


RACE 91 


wonder, to be angry, or disgusted, to be puffed 
up, or cast down, or to be affected with tender- 
ness—all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, 
. and various more complicated-emotions arising 
out of their combinations with each other, are 
common to all men, and bespeak in them deep- 
seated tendencies to react on stimulation in 
relatively particular and definite ways. And. 
there is much, I think, to be said in favour of 
this contention. 

Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a 
criterion whereby the different races of men 
_ are to be distinguished ? Far from it. Nay, 
on the contrary, as judged simply by his 
emotions, man is very much alike everywhere, 
from China to Peru. They are all there in 
germ, though different customs and grades 
of culture tend to bring special types of feeling 
to the fore. 

Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted 
here. The Negro, one would naturally say, 
is In general more emotional than the white 
man. Yet some experiments conducted by 
Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and white 
women, by means of the test of the effects 
of emotion on respiration, brought out the 
former as decidedly the more stolid of the two. 
And, whatever be thought of the value of 
such methods of proof, certain it is that the 
observers of rude races incline to put down 


92 ANTHROPOLOGY 


most of them as apathetic, when not tuned 
up to concert-pitch by a dance or other social 
event. It may well be, then, that it is not 
the hereditary temperament of the Negro, so 
much as the habit, which he shares with other 
peoples at the same level of culture, of living 
and acting in a crowd, that accounts for his 
apparent excitability. But after all, ‘ maffick- 
ing’’ is not unknown in civilized countries. 
Thus the quest for a race-mark of a mental 
kind is barren once more. 


What, then, you exclaim, is the outcome of 
this chapter of negatives? Is it driving at 
the universal equality and brotherhood of 
man? Or, on the contrary, does it hint at 
the need of a stern system of eugenics? I 
offer nothing in the way of a practical sugges- 
tion. I am merely trying to show that, con- 
sidered anthropologically—that is to say, in 
terms of pure theory—race or breed remains 
something which we cannot at present isolate, 
though we believe it to be there. Practice, 
meanwhile, must wait on theory; mere pre- 
judices, bad as they are, are hardly worse 
guides to action than premature exploitations 
of science. 

As regards the universal brotherhood of 
man, the most that can be said is this: The 
old ideas about race as something hard and 


RACE 93 


fast for all time are distinctly on the decline. 
Plasticity, or, in other words, the power of 
adaptation to environment, has to be admitted 
- to a greater share in the moulding of mind, 
and even of body, than ever before. But how 
plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. 
It may be that use-inheritance somehow incor- 
porates its effects in the offspring of the plastic 
parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity 
increases with inter-breeding on a wider basis. 
These problems have still to be solved. 

As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that 
_ a vast and persistent elimination of lives goes 
on even in civilized countries. It has been 
ealculated that, of every hundred English 
born alive, fifty do not survive to breed, and, 
of the remainder, half produce three-quarters 
of the next generation. But is the elimination 
selective ? We can hardly doubt that it is 
to some extent. But what its results are— 
whether it mainly favours immunity from 
certain diseases, or the capacity for a sedentary 
life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and 
capacity for social service—is largely matter of 
guesswork. How, then, can we say what is 
the type to breed from, even if we confine our 
attention to one country ? If, on the other 
hand, we look farther afield, and study the 
results of race-mixture or “ miscegenation,”’ 
we but encounter fresh puzzles. That the half- 


94 ANTHROPOLOGY 


breed is an unsatisfactory person may be true; 
and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing 
are somehow discounted, the race problem 
remains exactly where it was. Or, again, it 
may be true that miscegenation increases 
human fertility, as some hold; but, until it is 
shown that the increase of fertility does not 
merely result in flooding the world with 
inferior types, we are no nearer to a solution. 

If, then, there is a practical moral to this 
chapter, it is merely this: to encourage 
anthropologists to press forward with their 
study of race; and in the meantime to do 
nothing rash. 


CHAPTER IV 
ENVIRONMENT 


WHEN a child is born it has been subjected 
for some three-quarters of a year already to 
the influences of environment. Its race, 
indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment 
of conception. Yet that superadded measure 
of plasticity, which has to be treated as some- 
thing apart from the racial factor, enables it 
to respond for good or for evil to the pre- 
natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. 
Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of 


ENVIRONMENT 95 


supposing our race to be degenerate, when 
poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy sur- 
roundings on the part of the mothers are really 
- responsible for the crop of weaklings that we 
deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be 
so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of 
relief. Why? Because to improve the race 
by way of eugenics, though doubtless feasible 
within limits, remains an unrealized possibility 
through our want of knowledge. On the 
other hand, to improve the physical environ- 
ment is fairly straight-ahead work, once we 
_ ean awake the public conscience to the need 
of undertaking this task for the benefit of 
all classes of the community alike. If civi- 
- lized man wishes to boast of being clearly 
superior to the rest of his kind, it must be 
mainly in respect to his control over the 
physical environment. Whatever may have 
been the case in the past, it seems as true 
now-a-days to say that man makes his physical 
environment as that his physical environment 
makes him. 

Kven if this be granted, however, it remains 
the fact that our material circumstances in 
the widest. sense of the term play a very 
decisive part in the shaping of our lives. 
Hence the importance of geographical studies 
as they bear on the subject of man. From the 
moment that a child is conceived, it is sub- 


96 ANTHROPOLOGY 


jected to what it is now the fashion to cail a 
“geographic control.” ‘Take the case of 
the child of English parents born in India. 
Clearly several factors will conspire to deter- 
mine whether it lives or dies. For sim- 
plicity’s sake let us treat them as three. 
First of all, there is the fact that the child 
belongs to a particular cultural group; in 
other words, that it has been born with a 
piece of paper in its mouth representing one 
share in the British Empire. Secondly, there 
is its race, involving, let us say, blue eyes 
and light hair, and a corresponding consti- 
tution. Thirdly, there is the climate and all 
that goes with it. Though in the first of these 
respects the white child is likely to be superior 
to the native, inasmuch as it will be tended 
with more careful regard to the laws of health; 
yet such disharmony prevails between the 
other two factors of race and climate, that it 
will almost certainly die, if it is not removed 
at a certain age from the country. Possibly 
the English could acclimatize themselves in 
India at the price of an immense toll of infant 
lives; but it is a price which they show no 
signs of being willing to pay. 

What, then, are the limits of the geographic 
eontrol ? Where does its influence begin and 
end ? Situation, race, and culture—to reduce 
it to a problem of three terms only—which 


ENVIRONMENT 97 


of the three, if any, in the long run controls 
the rest ? Remember that the anthropologist 
is trying to be the historian of long perspective. 
History which counts by years, proto-history 
which counts by centuries, pre-history which 
counts by millenniums—he seeks to embrace 
them all. He sees the English in India, on 
the one hand, and in Australia on the other. 
Will the one invasion prove an incident, he 
asks, and the other an event, as judged by a 
history of long perspective? Or, again, there 
are whites and blacks and redskins in the 
southern portion of the United States of 
America, having at present little in common 
save acommon climate. Different races, differ- 
ent cultures, a common geographical situation 
—what net result will these yield for the 
historian of patient, far-seeing anthropological 
outlook ? Clearly there is here something 
worth the puzzling out. But we cannot expect 
to puzzle it out all at once. 

In these days geography, in the form known 
as anthropo-geography, is putting forth claims 
to be the leading branch of anthropology. 
And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geo- 
graphy must henceforth be part of the anthro- 
pologist’s equipment.t. The schools of Ratzel 


1°Thus the reader of the present work should not fail 
to’ study also Dr. Marion Newbigin’s Geography in this 
series. . 
G 


98 ANTHROPOLOGY > 


in Germany and Le Play in France are, how- 
ever, fertile in generalizations that are far too 
pretty to be true. Like other specialists, they 
exaggerate the importance of their particular 
brand of work. The full meaning of life can 
never be expressed in terms of its material 
conditions. I confess that I am not deeply 
moved when Ratzel announces that man is a 
piece of the earth. Or when his admirers, 
anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing 
the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or 
water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centro- 
sphere or interior mass, proceed to add that 
man is the most active portion of an inter- 
mittent biosphere, or living envelope of our 
planet, I cannot feel that the last word has 
been said about him. 

Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demo- 
lins, author of a very suggestive book, Comment 
la route crée le type social (“‘ How the road 
creates the social type’’). ‘“‘ There exists,” 
he says in his preface, “ on the surface of the 
terrestrial globe an infinite variety of peoples. 
What is the cause that has created this 
variety ? In general the reply is, Race. But 
race explains nothing; for it remains to dis- 
cover what has produced the diversity of 
races. Race is not a cause; it is a con- 
sequence. The first and decisive cause of the 
diversity of peoples and of the diversity of 


ENVIRONMENT 99 


races 1s the road that the peoples have followed. 
It is the road that creates the race, and that 
creates the social type.’’ And he goes further: 
~ “ Tf the history of humanity were to recom- 
mence, and the surface of the globe had not 
been transformed, this history would repeat 
itself in its main lines. There might well be 
secondary differences, for example, in certain 
manifestations of public life, in political revo- 
lutions, to which we assign far too great an 
importance; but the same roads would repro- 
duce the same social types, and would impose 
on them the same essential characters.” 
There is no contending with a pious opinion, 
especially when it takes the form of an un- 
verifiable prophecy. Let the level-headed 
anthropologist beware, however, lest he put 
all his eggs into one basket. Let him seek 
to give each factor in the problem its due. 
Race must count for something, or why do 
not the other animals take a leaf out of our 
book and build up rival civilizations on suitable 
sites ? Why do men herd cattle, instead of 
the cattle herding the men? We are rational 
beings, in other words, because we have it in 
us to be rational beings. Again, culture, with 
the intelligence and choice it involves, counts 
for something too. It is easy to argue that, 
since there were the Asiatic steppes with the 
wild horses ready to hand in them, man was 


100 ANTHROPOLOGY 


bound sooner or later to tame the horse 
and develop the characteristic culture of the 
nomad type. Yes, but why did man tame the 
horse later rather than sooner ? And why did 
the American redskins never tame the bison, 
and adopt a pastoral life in their vast prairies ? | 
Or why do modern black folk and white folk 
alike in Africa fail to utilize the elephant ? 
Is it because these things cannot be done, or 
because man has not found out how to do 
them ? 

When all allowances, however, are made 
for the exaggerations almost pardonable in 
a branch of science still engaged in pushing 
its way to the front, anthropo-geography 
remains a far-reaching method of historical 
study which the anthropologist has to learn 
how to use. To put it crudely, he must learn 
how to work all the time with a map of the 
earth at his elbow. 

First of all, let him imagine his world of 
man stationary. Let him plot out in turn 
the distribution of heat, of moisture, of dis- 
eases, of vegetation, of food-animals, of the 
physical types of man, of density of popu- 
lation, of industries, of forms of government, 
of religions, of languages, and so on and so 
forth. How far do these different distri- 
butions bear each other out ? He will find 
a number of things that go together in what 


_ ENVIRONMENT 101 


will strike him as a natural way. For instance, 
all along the equator, whether in Africa or 
South America or Borneo, he will find them 
_knocking off work in the middle of the day 
in order to take a siesta. On the other hand, 
other things will not agree so well. Thus, 
though all will be dark-skinned, the South 
Americans will be coppery, the Africans black, 
and the men of Borneo yellow. 

Led on by such discrepancies, perhaps, he 
will want next to set his world of man in 
movement. He will thereupon perceive a 
circulation, so to speak, amongst the various 
peoples, suggestive of interrelations of a new 
type. Now so long as he is dealing in de- 
scriptions of a detached kind, concerning not 
merely the physical environment, but likewise 
the social adjustments more immediately 
corresponding thereto, he will be working at 
the geographical level. Directly it comes, how- 
ever, to a generalized description or historical 
explanation, as when he seeks to show that 
here rather than there a civilization is likely 
to arise, geographical considerations proper 
will not suffice. Distribution is merely one 
aspect of evolution. Yet that it is a very 
important aspect will now be shown by a 
hasty survey of the world according to 
geographical regions. 


102 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Let us begin with Europe, so as to proceed 
gradually from the more known to the less 
known. Lecky has spoken of “ the European 
epoch of the human mind.” What is the 
geographical and physical theatre of that 
epoch ? We may distinguish—I borrow the 
suggestion from Professor Myres—three stages 
in its development. Firstly, there was the 
river-phase; next, the Mediterranean phase; 
lastly, the present-day Atlantic phase. Thus, 
to begin with, the valleys of the Nile and 
Euphrates were each the home of civilizations 
both magnificent and enduring. They did 
not spring up spontaneously, however. If 
the rivers helped man, man also helped the 
rivers by inventing systems of irrigation. 
Next, from Minoan days right on to the end 
of the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean basin 
was the focus of all the higher life in the world, 
if we put out of sight the civilizations of India 
and China, together with the lesser cultures of 
Peru and Mexico. I will consider this second 
phase especially, because it is particularly 
instructive from the geographical standpoint. 
Finally, since the time of the discovery of 
America, the sea-trade, first called into exist- 
ence as a civilizing agent by Mediterranean 
conditions, has shifted its base to the Atlantic 
coast, and especially to that land of natural 
harbours, the British Isles. We must give 


ENVIRONMENT 103 


up thinking in terms of an Eastern and Western 
Hemisphere. The true distinction, as applic- 
able to modern times, is between a _ land- 
hemisphere, with the Atlantic coast of Europe 
as its centre, and a sea-hemisphere, roughly 
coinciding with the Pacific. The Pacific is 
truly an ocean; but the Atlantic is becoming 
more of a “ herring-pond ”’ every day. 

Fixing our eyes, then, on the Mediterranean 
basin, with its Black Sea extension, it is easy 
to perceive that we have here a well-defined 
geographical province, capable of acting as an 
area, of characterization as perhaps no other 
in the world, once its various peoples had the 
taste and ingenuity to intermingle freely by 
way of the sea. ‘The first fact to note is the 
completeness of the ring-fence that shuts it in. 
From the Pyrenees right along to Ararat runs 
the great Alpine fold, like a ridge in a crumpled 
table-cloth; the Spanish Sierras and the Atlas 
continue the circle to the south-west; and 
the rest is desert. Next, the configuration 
of the coasts makes for intercourse by sea, 
especially on the northern side with its penin- 
sulas and islands, the remains of a foundered 
and drowned mountain-country. This same 
configuration, considered in connection with 
the flora and fauna that are favoured by the 
climate, goes far to explain that discontinuity 
of the political life which encouraged inde- 


104 ANTHROPOLOGY 


pendence whilst it prevented self-sufficiency. 
The forest-belt, owing to the dry summer, 
lay towards the snow-line, and below it a 
scrub-belt, yielding poor hunting, drove men 
to grow their corn and olives and vines in the 
least swampy of the lowlands, scattered like 
mere oases amongst the hills and promon- - 
tories. 

For a long time, then, man along the 
north coasts must have been oppressed rather 
than assisted by his environment. It made 
mass-movements impossible. Great waves of 
migration from the steppe-land to the north- 
east, or from the forest-land to the north-west, 
would thunder on the long mountain barrier, 
only to trickle across in rivulets and form little 
pools of humanity here and there. Petty feuds 
between plain, shore, and mountain, as in 
ancient Attica, would but accentuate the pre- 
vailing division. Contrariwise, on the southern 
side of the Mediterranean, where there was 
open, if largely desert, country, there would 
be room under primitive conditions for a homo- 
geneous race to multiply. Itisin North Africa 
that we must probably place the original hot- 
bed of that Mediterranean race, slight and © 
dark with oval heads and faces, who during 
the neolithic period colonized the opposite 
side of the Mediterranean, and threw out a 
wing along the warm Atlantic coast as far 


ENVIRONMENT 105 


north as Scotland, as well as eastwards to the 
Upper Danube; whilst by way of south and 
east they certainly overran Egypt, Arabia, and 
Somaliland, with probable ramifications still 
farther in both directions. At last, however, 
in the eastern Mediterranean was learnt the 
lesson of the profits attending the sea-going 
life, and there began the true Mediterranean 
phase, which is essentially an era of sea-borne 
commerce. Then was the chance for the 
northern shore with its peninsular configura- 
tion. Carthage on the south shore must be 
regarded as a bold experiment that did not 
answer. The moral, then, would seem to be 
that the Mediterranean basin proved an ideal 
nursery for seamen; but only as soon as men 
were brave and clever enough to take to the 
sea. ‘The geographical factor is at least partly 
consequence as well as cause. 


Now let us proceed farther north into what 
was for the earlier Mediterranean folk the 
breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders, 
forming the chief menace to their circuit of 
settled civic life. It is necessary to regard 
northern Europe and northern Asia as forming 
one geographic province. Asia Minor, together 
with the Euphrates valley and with Arabia 
in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterranean 
area. India and China, with the south-eastern 


106 ANTHROPOLOGY 


corner of Asia that lies between them, form 
another system that will be considered separ- 
ately later on. 

The Eurasian northland consists naturally, 
that is to say, where cultivation has not 
introduced changes, of four belts. First, to 
the southward, come the mountain ranges 
passing eastwards into high plateau. Then, 
north of this line, from the Lower Danube 
as far as China, stretches a belt of grassland 
or steppe-country at a lower level, a belt which 
during the milder periods of the ice-age and 
immediately after it must have reached as 
far as the Atlantic. Then we find, still farther 
to the north, a forest belt, well developed in 
the Siberia of to-day. Lastly, on the verge 
of the Arctic sea stretches the tundra, the 
frozen soil of which is fertile in little else than 
a crop of reindeer moss, whilst to the west, 
as, for instance, in our islands, moors and 
bogs represent this zone of barren lands in 
a milder form. 

The mountain belt is throughout its entire 
length the home of round-headed peoples, the 
so-called Alpine race, which is_ generally 
supposed to have originally come from the 
high plateau country of Asia. These round- 
headed men in western Europe appear where- 
ever there are hills, throwing out offshoots by 
way of the highlands of central France inte 


ENVIRONMENT 107 


Brittany, and also reaching the British Isles. 
Here they introduced the use of bronze (an 
invention possibly acquired by contact with 
Egyptians in the near East), though without 
leaving any marked traces of themselves 
amongst the permanent population. At the 
other end of Europe they affected Greece by 
way of a steady though limited infiltration; 
whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their 
hills‘as the formidable Hittites, the people, 
by the way, to whom the Jews are said to 
owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, 
noses. But are these round-heads all of one 
race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward a 
rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, 
just as the long-faced Boer horse soon 
evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into 
a round-headed pony, so it is in a few genera- 
tions with human mountaineers, irrespective 
of their breed. This is almost certainly to 
overrate the effects of environment. At the 
same time, in the present state of our know- 
ledge, it would be premature either to affirm 
or deny that in the very long run round- 
headedness goes with a mountain life. 

The grassland next claims our attention. 
Here is the paradise of the horse, and conse- 
quently of the horse-breaker. Hence, there- 
fore, came the charging multitudes of Asiatic 
marauders who, after many repulses, broke 


108 ANTHROPOLOGY 


through the Mediterranean cordon, and estab- 
lished themselves as the modern Turks; whilst 
at the other end of their beat they poured into 
China, which no great wall could avail to save, 
and established the Manchu domination. 
Given the steppe-country and a horse-taming 
people, we might seek, with the anthropo- 
geographers of the bolder sort, to deduce the 
whole way of life, the nomadism, the ample 
food, including the milk-diet infants need and 
find so hard to obtain farther south, the 
communal system, the patriarchal type of 
authority, the caravan-system that can set 
the whole horde moving along like a swarm 
of locusts, andsoon. But, as has been already 
pointed out, the horse had to be tamed first. 
Paleolithic man in western Europe had horse- 
meat in abundance. At Solutré, a little north 
of Lyons, a heap of food-refuse 100 yards 
long and 10 feet high largely consists of the 
bones of horses, most of them young and 
tender. This shows that the old hunters 
knew how to enjoy the passing hour in their 
improvident way, like the equally reckless 
Bushmen, who have left similar Golgothas 
behind them in South Africa. Yet apparently 
paleolithie man did not tame the horse. 
Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; 
and man may not be ready to take it. 

The forest-land of the north affords fair 


ENVIRONMENT 109 


hunting in its way, but it is doubtful if it is 
fitted to rear a copious brood of men, at any 
rate so long as stone weapons are alone avail- 
able wherewith to master the vegetation and 
effect clearings, whilst burning the brushwood 
down is precluded by the damp. Where the 
original home may have been of the so-called 
Nordic race, the large-limbed fair men of the 
Teutonic world, remains something of a 
mystery; though it is now the fashion to 
place it in the north-east of Europe rather 
than in Asia, and to suppose it to have been 
more or less isolated from the rest of the world 
by formerly existing sheets of water. Where- 
ever it was, there must have been grassland 
enough to permit of pastoral habits, modified, 
perhaps, by some hunting on the one hand, and 
by some primitive agriculture on the other. 
The Mediterranean men, coming from North 
Africa, an excellent country for the horse, 
may have vied with the Asiatics of the steppes 
in introducing a varied culture to the north. 
At any rate, when the Germans of Tacitus 
emerge into the light of history, they are not 
mere foresters, but rather woodlanders, men of 
the glades, with many sides to their life; includ- 
ing an acquaintance with the sea and its ways, 
surpassing by far that of those early beach- 
combers whose miserable kitchen-middens are 
to be found along the coast of Denmark. 


110 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Of the tundra it is enough to say that all 
depends on the reindeer. This animal is the 
be-all and end-all of Lapp existence. When 
Nansen, after crossing Greenland, sailed home 
with his two Lapps, he called their attention 
to the crowds of people assembled to welcome 
them at the harbour. ‘“‘ Ah,” said the elder 
and more thoughtful of the pair, “‘ if they were 
only reindeer!’’ When domesticated, the 
reindeer yields milk as well as food, though 
large numbers are needed to keep the com- 
munity in comfort. Otherwise hunting and 
fishing must serve to eke out the larder. 
Miserable indeed are the tribes or rather 
remnants of tribes along the Siberian tundra 
who have no reindeer. On the other hand, if 
there are plenty of wild reindeer, as amongst 
the Koryaks and some of the Chukchis, 
hunting by itself suffices. 


Let us now pass on from the Eurasian 
northland to what is, zoologically, almost 
its annexe, North America; its tundra, for 
example, where the Eskimo live, being strictly 
continuous with the Asiatic zone. Though 
having a very different fauna and flora, South 
America presumably forms part of the same 
geographical province so far as man is con- 
cerned, though there is evidence for thinking 
that he reached it very early. Until, however, 


ENVIRONMENT 111 


more data are available for the pre-history of 
the American Indian, the great moulding forces, 
geographical or other, must be merely guessed 
at. Much turns on the period assigned to the 
first appearance of man in this region; for 
that he is indigenous is highly improbable, 
if only because no anthropoid apes are found 
here. The racial type, which, with the ex- 
' ception of the Eskimo, and possibly of the 
salmon-fishing tribes along the north-west 
coast, is one for the whole continent, has a 
rather distant resemblance to that of the 
Asiatic Mongols. Nor is there any difficulty 
in finding the immigrants a means of transit 
from northern Asia. Even if it be held that 
the land-bridge by way of what are now the 
Aleutian Islands was closed at too early a date 
for man to profit by it, there is always the 
passage over the ice by way of Behring Straits ; 
which, if it bore the mammoth, as is proved 
by its remains in Alaska, could certainly bear 
man. : 

Once man was across, what was the manner 
of his distribution ? On this point geography 
can at present tell us little. M. Demolins, 
it is true, describes three routes, one along the 
Rockies, the next down the central zone of 
prairies, and the third and most easterly by 
way of the great lakes. But this is pure 
hypothesis. No facts are adduced. Indeed, 


112 ANTHROPOLOGY 


evidence bearing on distribution is very hard 
to obtain in this area, since the physical type 
is so uniform throughout. The best available 
criterion is the somewhat poor one of the 
distribution of the very various languages. 
Some curious lines of migration are indicated: 
by the occurrence of the same type of language 
in widely separated regions, the most striking 
example being the appearance of one linguistic 
stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in 
the north-west by the Alaska boundary; at 
one or two points in south-western Oregon 
and north-western California, where an abso- 
lute medley of languages prevails; and again 
in the southern highlands along the line of 
Colorado and Utah to the other side of the 
Mexican frontier. Does it follow from this 
distribution that the Apaches, at the southern 
end of the range, have come down from Alaska, 
by way of the Rockies and the Pacific slope, 
to their present habitat? It might be so in 
this particular case; but there are also those 
who think that the signs in general point to 
a northward dispersal of tribes, who before 
had been driven south by a period of glacia- 
tion. Thus the first thing to be settled is 
the antiquity of the American type of man. 

A glance at South America must suffice. 
Geographically it consists of three regions. 
Westwards we have the Pacific line of bracing 


ENVIRONMENT 113 


highlands, running down from Mexico as far as 
Chile, the home of two or more cultures of a 
rather high order. Then to the east there is 
the steaming equatorial forest, first covering 
a fan of rivers, then rising up into healthier 
hill-country, the whole in its wild state hamper- 
ing to human enterprise. And below it occurs 
the grassland of the pampas, only needing the 
horse to bring out the powers of its native 
occupants. 

Before leaving this subject of the domesti- 
cated horse, of which so much use has already 
been made in order to illustrate how geographic 
opportunity and human contrivance must help 
each other out, it is worth noticing how an 
invention can quickly revolutionize even that 
cultural life of the ruder races which is usually 
supposed to be quite hide-bound by im- 
memorial custom. When the Europeans first 
broke in upon the redskins of North America, 
they found them a people of hunters and 
fishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a 
second string everywhere east of the Missis- 
sippi as weil as to the south, and on the whole 
sedentary, with villages scattered far apart; 
so that in pre-Conquest days they would seem 
to have been enjoying a large measure of 
security and peace. The coming of the whites 
soon crowded them back upon themselves, 
disarranging the old boundaries. At the same 

a . 


114 ANTHROPOLOGY 


time the horse and the gun were introduced. 
With extraordinary rapidity the Indian 
adapted himself to a new mode of existence, 
a grassland life, complicated by the fact that 
the relentless pressure of the invaders gave 
it a predatory turn which it might otherwise 
have lacked. Something very similar, though 
neither conditions nor consequences were quite 
the same, occurred in the pampas of South 
America, where horse-Indians like the Pata- 
gonians, who seem at first sight the indigenous 
outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent 
by-product of an intrusive culture. 


And now let us hark back to southern Asia 
with its two reservoirs of life, India and China, 
and between them a jutting promontory 
pointing the way to the Indonesian archi- 
pelago, and thence onward farther still to 
the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad 
Jands ranging in size from a continent to a 
coral-atoll. Here we have a nursery of sea- 
men on a vaster scale than in the Mediter- 
ranean; for remember that from this point 
man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter 
Island in the Eastern Pacific right away to 
Madagascar, where we find Javanese immi- 
grants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, 
whilst the language is of a Malayo-Polynesian 


type. 


ENVIRONMENT 115 


India and China each well-nigh deserve the 
status of geographical provinces on their own 
account. Each is an area of settlement; and, 
once there is settlement, there is a cultural 
influence which co-operates with the environ- 
ment to weed out immigrant forms; as we see, 
for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic 
physical type, or rather pair of types, a coarser — 
and-a finer, has apparently persisted, despite 
the constant influx of other races, from the 
dawn of its long history. India, however, and 
China have both suffered so much invasion 
from the Eurasian northland, and at the same 
time are of such great extent and comprise 
such diverse physical conditions, that they 
have, in the course of the long years, sent forth 
very various broods of men to seek their 
fortunes in the south-east. 

Nor must we ignore the possibility of an 
earlier movement in the opposite direction. 
In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and 
gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many 
authorities would place the original home of 
the human race. It will be wise to touch 
lightly on matters involving considerations of 
paleeo-geography, that most kaleidoscopic of 
studies. The submerged continents which it 
calls from the vasty deep have a habit of 
crumbling away again. Let us therefore re- 
frain from providing man with land-bridges 


116 ANTHROPOLOGY 


(draw-bridges, they might almost be called), 
whether between the Indonesian islands; 
or between New Guinea, Australia and Tas- 
mania; or between Indonesia and Africa by 
way of the Indian Ocean. Let the curious 
facts about the present distribution of the 
racial types speak for themselves, the difficul- 
ties about identifying a racial type being in 
the meantime ever borne in mind. 

Most striking of all is the diffusion of the 
Negro stocks with black skin and woolly hair. 
Their range is certainly suggestive of a 
breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. 
To the extreme west are the negroes of Africa, 
to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans 
and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea 
through the oceanic islands as far as Fiji. 
A series of connecting links is afforded by the 
small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called 
Negritos. It is not known how far they 
represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experi- 
ment in negro-making, though this is the 
prevailing view; or whether the negro type, 
with its tendency to infantile characters due 
to the early closing of the cranial sutures, is 
apt to throw off dwarfed forms in an occasional 
_ way. At any rate, in Africa there are several 
groups of pygmies in the Congo region, as well 
as the Bushmen and allied stocks in South 
Africa. ‘then the Andaman Islanders, the 


KN VIRONMENT 117 


Semang of the Malay Peninsula, the Aket of 
eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of 
Java, said to have been in some respects the 
most ape-like of human beings, the Aetas of 
the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a 
surprisingly high culture, recently reported 
from Dutch New Guinea, are like so many 
scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, 
if we turn our gaze southward, we find that 
Negritos until the other day inhabited 
Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of 
Negrito, or Negro (Papuan), blood is likewise 
to be detected. 

Are we here on the track of the original 
dispersal of man? It is impossible to say. 
It is not even certain, though highly probable, 
that man originated in one spot. If he did, 
he must have been hereditarily endowed, 
almost from the outset, with an adaptability 
to different climates quite unique in its way. 
The tiger is able to range from the hot Indian 
jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; but 
man is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all 
others. Somehow, on this theory of a single 
origin, he made his way to every quarter of 
the globe; and when he got there, though 
needing time, perhaps, to acquire the local 
colour, managed in the end to be at home. It 
looks as if both race and a dash of culture had 
a good deal to do with his exploitation of 


118 ANTHROPOLOGY 


geographical opportunity. How did the Aus- 
tralians and their Negrito forerunners invade 
their Austral world, at some period which, we 
cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in 
time ? Certain at least it is that they crossed 
a formidable barrier. What is known as 
Wallace’s line corresponds with the deep 
channel running between the islands of Bali 
and Lombok and continuing northwards to 
the west of Celebes. On the eastern side the 
fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehow into 
Australia with its queer monotremes and mar- 
supials entered triumphant man—man and 
the dog with him. Haeckel has suggested that 
man followed the dog, playing as it were the 
jackal tohim. But this sounds rather absurd. 
It looks as if man had already acquired enough 
seamanship to ferry himself across the zoo- 
logical divide, and to take his faithful dog 
with him on board his raft or dug-out. Until 
we have facts whereon to build, however, it 
would be as unpardonable to lay down the 
law on these matters as it is permissible te 
fill up the blank by guesswork. 

It remains to round off our original survey 
by a word or two more about the farther 
extremities, west, south, and east, of this 
vast southern world, to which south-eastern 
Asia furnishes a natural approach. The 
negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa 


ENVIRONMENT 119 


south of the Sahara, all to themselves. In 
and near the equatorial forest-region of the 
west the pure type prevails, displaying agri- 
cultural pursuits such as the cultivation of 
the banana, and, farther north, of millet, 
that must have been acquired before the race 
was driven out of the more open country. 
Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with 
intrusive pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean 
type, the negro blood, however, tending to 
predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and 
similar stocks to the west along the grass- 
land bordering on the desert; the Nilotic folk 
amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and 
throughout the eastern and southern parkland 
the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept 
the Bushmen and the kindred Hoitentots 
before them down into the desert country in 
the extreme south-west. It may be added 
that Africa has a rich fauna and flora, much 
mineral wealth, and a physical configuration 
that, in respect to its interior, though not to 
its coasts, is highly diversified; so that it 
may be doubted whether the natives have 
reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture 
as the resources of the environment, considered 
by itself, might seem to warrant. If the use of 
iron was invented in Africa, as some believe, it 
would only be another proof that opportunity 
is nothing apart from the capacity to grasp it. 


120 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Of the Australian aborigines something has 
been said already. Apart from the Negrito 
or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually 
held to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock 
represented by various jungle tribes in 
southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, 
connecting links between the two areas being 
the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and Hast 
Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes. It may 
be worth observing, also, that pre-historicskulls 
of the Neanderthal type find their nearest 
parallels in modern Australia. We are here 
in the presence of some very ancient dispersal, _ 
from what centre and in what direction it is 
hard to imagine. In Australia these early 
colonists found pleasant, if somewhat lightly 
furnished, lodgings. In particular there were 
no dangerous beasts; so that hunting was 
hardly calculated to put a man on his mettle, 
as in more exacting climes. Isolation, and 
the consequent absence of pressure from 
human intruders, is another fact in the situa- 
tion. Whatever the causes, the net result 
was that, despite a very fair environment, 
away from the desert regions of the interior, 
man on the whole stagnated. In regard to 
material comforts and conveniences, the 
rudeness of their life seems to us appalling. 
On the other hand, now that we are coming 
to know something of the inner life and 


ENVIRONMENT 121 


mental history of the Australians, a somewhat 
different complexion is put upon the state of 
their culture. With very plain living went 
- something that approached to high thinking; 
and we must recognize in this case, as in others, 
what might be termed a differential evolution 
of culture, according to which some elements 
may advance, whilst others stand still, or even 
decay. 

To another and a very different people, 
namely, the Polynesians, the same notion of 
a differential evolution may be profitably 
applied. .They were in the stone-age when 
first discovered, and lacked many useful arts. 
On the other hand, with coco-nut, bananas 
and bread-fruit, they had abundant means of 
sustenance, and were thoroughly at home in 
their magnificent canoes. Thus their island- 
life was rich in ease and variety; and, whilst 
rude in certain respects, they were almost 
civilized in others. Their racial affinities are 
somewhat complex. What is almost certain 
is that they only occupied the Eastern Pacifie 
during the course of the last 1500 years or so. 
They probably came from Indonesia, mixing 
to a slight extent with Melanesians on their 
way. How the proto-Polynesians came into 
existence in Indonesia is more problematic. 
Possibly they were the result of a mix- 
ture between long-headed immigrants from 


122 ANTHROPOLOGY 


eastern India, and round-headed Mongols 
from Indo-China and the rest of south-eastern 
Asia, from whom the present Malays are 
derived. 


We have completed our very rapid regional 
survey of the world; and what do we find ? 
By no means is it case after case of one region 
corresponding to one type of man and to one 
type of culture. It might be that, given 
persistent physical conditions of a uniform 
kind, and complete isolation, human life would 
in the end conform to these conditions, or in 
other words stagnate. No one can tell, and 
no one wants to know, because as a matter 
of fact no such environmental conditions occur 
in this world of ours. Human history reveals 
itself as a bewildering series of interpene- 
trations. What excites these movements ? 
Geographical causes, say the theorists of one 
idea. No doubt man moves forward partly 
because nature kicks him behind. But in 
the first place some types of animal life go 
forward under pressure from nature, whilst 
others lie down and die. In the second place 
man has an accumulative faculty, a social 
memory, whereby he is able to carry on to 
the conquest of a new environment whatever 
has served him in the old. But this is as it 
were to compound environments—a process 


ENVIRONMENT 1238 


that ends by: making the environment co- 
extensive with the world. Intelligent assimi- 
lation of the new by means of the old breaks 
down the provincial barriers one by one, until 
‘man, the cosmopolitan animal by reason of 
his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmo- 
politan culture; at first almost unconsciously, 
but later on with self-conscious intent, because 
he is no longer content to live, but insists on 
living well. 

As a sequel to this brief examination of the 
geographic control considered by itself it would 
be interesting, if space allowed, to append a 
study of the distribution of the arts and crafts 
of a more obviously economic and utilitarian 
type. If the physical environment were all 
in all, we ought to find the same conditions 
evoking the same industrial appliances every- 
where, without the aid of suggestions from 
other quarters. Indeed, so little do we know 
about the conditions attending the discovery 
of the arts of life that gave humanity its all- 
important start—the making of fire, the 
taming of animals, the sowing of plants, and 
so on—that it is only too easy to misread our 
map. We know almost nothing of those 
movements of peoples, in the course of which 
a given art was brought from one part of the 
world to another. Hence, when we find the 
art duly installed in a particular place, and 


124 ANTHROPOLOGY 


utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the 
south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as 
it naturally does, we easily slip into the error 
of supposing that the local products of them- 
selves called the art into existence. Similar 
needs, we say, have generated similar expedi- 
ents. No doubt there is some truth in this 
principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, history 
tends to repeat itself in the case of the great 
useful inventions. We are all of us born imi- 
tators, but inventive genius is rare. | 

Take the case of the early paleeoliths of the 
drift type. From Egypt, Somaliland, and 
many other distant lands come examples which 
Sir John Evans finds “so identical in form 
and character with British specimens that 
they might have been manufactured by the 
same hands.’”’ And throughout the paleolithie 
age in Kurope the very limited number and 
regular succession of forms testifies to the 
innate conservatism of man, and the slow 
progress of-invention. And yet, as some 
American writers have argued—who do not 
find that the distinction between chipped 
palzoliths and polished neoliths of an alto- 
gether later age applies equally well to the 
New World—it was just as easy to have got 
an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact 
remains that in the Old World human inven- 
tiveness moved along one channel rather than 


ENVIRONMENT 125 


another, and for an immense lapse of time no 
one was found to strike outa new line. There 
was plénty of sand and water for polish- 
ing, but it did not occur to their minds to 
use them. 

To wind up this chapter, however, I shall 
glance at the distribution, not of any imple- 
- ment connected directly and obviously with 
the utilization of natural products, but of a 
downright oddity, something that might easily 
be invented once only and almost immediately 
dropped again. And yet here it is all over the 
world, going back, we may conjecture, to very 
ancient times, and implying interpenetrations 
of bygone peoples, of whose wanderings per- 
haps we may never unfold the secret. It is 
called the “ bull-roarer,”’ and is simply a slat 
of wood on the end of a string, which when 
whirled round produces a rather unearthly 
humming sound. Will the anthropo-geo- 
grapher, after studying the distribution of 
wood and stringy substances round the globe, 
venture to prophesy that, if man lived his 
half a million years or so over again, the 
bull-roarer would be found spread about very 
much where it is to-day ? ‘“ Bull-roarer ”’ is 
just one of our local names for what survives 
now-a-days as a toy in many an old-fashioned 
corner of the British Isles, where it is also 
known as. boomer, buzzer, whizzer, swish, 


126 ANTHROPOLOGY 


and so on. Without going farther afield we 
can get a hint of the two main functions which 
it seems to have fulfilled amongst ruder 
peoples. In Scotland it is, on the one hand, 
sometimes used to “ ca’ the cattle hame.”’ 
A herd-boy has been seen to swing a bull- 
roarer of his own making, with the result that 
the beasts were soon running frantically to- 
wards the byre. On the other hand, it is 
sometimes regarded there as a “ thunner- 
spell,” a charm against thunder, the super- 
stition being that like cures like, and whatever 
makes a noise like thunder will be on good 
terms, so to speak, with the real thunder. 

As regards its uses in the rest of the world, 
it may be said at once that here and there, in 
Galicia in Europe, in the Malay Peninsula in 
Asia, and amongst the Bushmen in Africa, 
it is used to drive or scare animals, whether 
tame or wild. And this, to make a mere 
guess, may have been its earliest use, if utili- 
tarian contrivances can generally . claim 
historical precedence, as is by no means 
certain. As long as man hunted with very 
inferior weapons, he must have depended a 
good deal on drives, that either forced the 
game into a pitfall, or rounded them up so 
as to enable a concerted attack to be made 
by the human pack. No wonder that the 
bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring Juck in 


ENVIRONMENT 127 


a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, 
however, at the present day, the bull-roarer 
serves ‘another type of mystic purpose, its 
noise, which is so suggestive of thunder or 
wind, with a superadded touch of weirdness 
and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading 
part in rain-making ceremonies. From these 
not improbably have developed all sorts of 
other ceremonies connected with making 
vegetation and the crops grow, and with 
making the boys grow into men, as is done at 
the initiation rites. It is not surprising, there- 
fore, to find a carved human face appearing 
on the bull-roarer in New Guinea, and again 
away in North America, whilst in West Africa 
it is held to contain the voice of a very god. 
In Australia, too, all their higher notions about 
a benevolent deity and about religious matters 
in general seem to concentrate on this strange 
symbol, outwardly the frailest of toys, yet to 
the spiritual eye of these simple folk a veritable 
holy of holies. © 

And now for the merest sketch of its distri- 
bution, the details of which are to be learnt 
from Dr. Haddon’s valuable paper in The 
Study of Man. England, Scotland, Ireland 
and Wales have it. It can be tracked along 
central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, 
and Poland beyond the Carpathians, where- 
upon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac 


128 ANTHROPOLOGY 


mysteries takes up the tale.* In America 
it is found amongst the Eskimo, is scattered 
over the northern part of the continent down 
to the Mexican frontier, and then turns up 
afresh in central Brazil. Again, from the 
Malay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over 
the great fan of darker peoples, from Africa, 
west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, 
and Australia, together with New Zealand 
alone of Polynesian islands—a fact possibly 
showing it to have belonged to some earlier 
race of colonists. Thus in all of the great 
geographical areas the bull-roarer is found, 
and that without reckoning in analogous — 
implements like the so-called “ buzz,’? which 
cover further ground, for instance, the eastern 
coastlands of Asia. Are we to postulate 
many independent origins, or else far-reaching 
transportations by migratory peoples, by the 
American Indians and the negroes, for ex- 
ample? No attempt can be made here to 
answer these questions. It is enough to have 
shown by the use of a single illustration how 
the study of the geographical distribution of 
inventions raises as many difficulties as it 
solves. 

Our conclusion, then, must be that the 
anthropologist, whilst constantly consulting 


1 Moreover, in Europe it almost certainly goes back to 
late-paleolithic times. 


ENVIRONMENT 129 


his physical map of the world, must not 
suppose that by so doing he will be saved all 
further trouble. Geographical facts represent 
a passive condition, which life, something by 
its very nature active, obeys, yet in obeying 
conquers. We cannot get away from the fact 
that we are physically determined. Yet 
physical determinations have been surmounted 
by human nature in a way to which the rest 
of the animal world affords no parallel. Thus 
man, as the old saying has it, makes love all 
the year round. Seasonal changes of course 
affect him, yet he is no slave of the seasons. 
And so it is with the many other elements 
involved in the “ geographic control.” The 
‘road,’ for instance—that is to say, any 
natural avenue of migration or communi- 
cation, whether by land over bridges and 
through passes, or by sea between harbours, 
and with trade-winds to swell the sails—takes 
a hand in the game of life, and one that holds 
many trumps; but so again does the non- 
geographical fact that your travelling-machine 
may be your pair of legs, or a horse, or a boat, 
or a railway, or an airship. Let us be moderate 
in all things, then, even in our references to 
the force of circumstances. Circumstances 
can unmake; but of themselves they never 
yet made man, nor any other form of life. 


I 


130 ANTHROPOLOGY 


CHAPTER V 
LANGUAGE 


Tue differentia of man—the quality that 
marks him off from the other animal kinds— 
is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. 
Thereby his mind itself becomes articulate. 
If language is ultimately a creation of the 
intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the 
intellect a creation of language. As flesh 
depends on bone, so does the living tissue of 
our spiritual life depend on its supporting 
framework of steadfast verbal forms. The 
genius, the heaven-born benefactor of human- 
ity, is essentially he who wrestles with 
‘“‘ thoughts too deep for words,”’ until at last 
he assimilates them to the scheme of meanings 
embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus 
raises them definitely above the threshold of 
the common consciousness, which is likewise 
the threshold of the common culture. 

There is good reason, then, for prefixing 
a short chapter on language to an account 
of those factors in the life of man _ that 
together stand on the whole for the prin- 
ciple of freedom—of rational self-direction. 
Heredity and environment do not, indeed, 
lie utterly beyond the range of our control. 
As they are viewed from the standpoint of 


LANGUAGE 131 


human history as a whole, they show each 
in its own fashion a certain capacity to meet 
the needs and purposes of the life-force half- 
way. Regarded abstractly, however, they 
may conveniently be treated as purely passive 
and limiting conditions. Here we are with 
a constitution not of our choosing, and in a 
world not of our choosing. Given this 
inheritance, and this environment, how are we, 
by taking thought and taking risks, to 
achieve the _ best-under-the-circumstances ? 
Such is the vital problem as it presents itself 
to any particular generation of men. 

The environment is as it were the enemy. 
We are out to conquer and enslave it. Our 
inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling 
force we obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles 
in our blood, and nerves the muscles of our 
arm. This force of heredity, however, ab- 
stractly considered, is blind. Yet, corporately 
and individually, we fight with eyes that see. 
This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing 
the light of experience represents a third 
element in the situation; and, from the stand- 
point of man’s desire to know himself, the 
supreme element. The environment, inas- 
much as under this conception are included 
all other forms of life except man, can muster 
on its side a certain amount of intelligence of 
a low order. But man’s prerogative is to 


132 ANTHROPOLOGY 


dominate his world by the aid of intelligence 
of a high order. When he defied the ice-age 
by the use of fire, when he outfaced and 
outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, 
he was already the rational animal, homo 
sapiens. In his way he thought, even in those 
far-off days. And therefore we may assume, 
until direct evidence is forthcoming to the 
contrary, that he likewise had language of an 
articulate kind. He tried to make a speech, 
we may almost say, as soon as he had learned 
to stand up on his hind legs. 

Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means 
of carrying back the history of human speech 
to its first beginnings. In the latter half of 
the last century, whilst the ferment of Darwin- 
ism was freshly seething, all sorts of specula- 
tions were rife concerning the origin of 
language. One school sought the source of 
the earliest words in imitative sounds of the 
type of bow-wow; another in interjectional 
expressions of the type of tut-tut. Or, again, 
as was natural in Europe, where, with the 
exception of Basque in a corner of the west, 
and of certain Asiatic languages, Turkish, 
Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, 
all spoken tongues present certain obvious 
affinities, the comparative philologist under- 
took to construct sundry great families of 
speech; and it was hoped that sooner or 


LANGUAGE . 183 


later, by working back to some linguistic 
parting of the ways, the central problem would 
be solved of the dispersal of the world’s races. 

These painted bubbles have burst. The 
further examination of the forms of speech 
current amongst peoples of rude culture has 
not revealed a conspicuous wealth either of 
imitative or of interjectional sounds. On 
the other hand, the comparative study of 
the European, or, as they must be termed in 
virtue of the branch stretching through Persia 
into India, the Indo-European stock of 
languages, carries us back three or four 
thousand years at most—a mere nothing in 
terms of anthropological time. Moreover, a 
more extended search through the world, 
which in many of its less cultured parts 
furnishes no literary remains that may serve 
to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows endless 
diversity of tongues in place of the hoped- 
for system of a few families; so that half a 
hundred apparently independent types must 
be distinguished in North America alone. 
For the rest, it has become increasingly clear 
that race and language need not go together 
at all. What philologist, for instance, could 
ever discover, if he had no history to help 
him, but must rely wholly on the examination 
of modern French, that the bulk of the 
population of France is connected by way of 


134 ANTHROPOLOGY 


blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, 
until the Roman conquest caused them to 
adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. 
The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless 
not so very long before, ousted some earlier 
type of language, perhaps one allied to the 
still surviving Basque; though it is not in the 
least necessary, therefore, to suppose that the 
Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previ- 
ous inhabitants of the land to a corresponding 
extent. Races, in short, mix readily; lan- 
guages, except in very special circumstances, 
hardly at all. 

Disappointed in its hope of presiding over 
the reconstruction of the distant past of man, 
the study of language has in recent years 
tended somewhat to renounce the historical 
—_that is to say, anthropological—method 
altogether. The alternative is a purely formal 
treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas 
vocabularies seem hopelessly divergent in 
their special contents, the general apparatus 
of vocal expression is broadly the same every- 
where. That all men alike communicate 
by talking, other symbols and codes into which 
thoughts can be translated, such as gestures, 
the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, 
smoke signals, and so on, being in the main 
but secondary and derivative, is a fact of 
which the very universality may easily: blind 


LANGUAGE 135 


us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, 
the science of phonetics—having lost that 
** guid conceit of itself ’? which once led it to 
discuss at large whether the art of talking 
_ evolved at a single geographical centre, or at 
many centres owing to similar capacities of 
body and mind—contents itself now-a-days 
for the most part with conducting an analytic 
_survey of the modes of vocal expression as 
correlated with the observed tendencies of the 
human speech-organs. And what is true of 
phonetics in particular is hardly less true of 
comparative philology as a whole. Its present 
procedure is in the main analytic or formal. 
Thus its fundamental distinction between iso- 
lating, agglutinative and inflectional languages 
is arrived at simply by contrasting the differ- 
ent ways in which words are affected by being 
put together into a sentence. No attempt is 
made to show that one type of arrangement 
normally precedes another in time, or that it 
is in any way more rudimentary—that is to 
say, less adapted to the needs of human inter- 
course. It is not even pretended that a given 
language is bound to exemplify one, and one 
alone, of these three types ; though the process 
known as analogy—that is, the regularizing of 
exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were 
like—will always be apt to establish one system 
at the expense of the rest. 


136 ANTHROPOLOGY 


If, then, the study of language is to recover 
its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological 
studies, it looks as if a new direction must be 
given to its inquiries. And there is much 
to be said for any change that would bring 
about this result. Without constant help 
from the philologist, anthropology is bound 
to languish. To thoroughly understand the 
speech of the people under investigation is 
the field-worker’s master-key; so much so, 
that the critic’s first question in determining 
the value of an ethnographical work must 
always be, Could the author talk freely with 
the natives in their own tongue? But how 
is the study of particular languages to be 
pursued successfully, if it lack the stimulus 
and inspiration which only the search for 
general principles can impart to any branch 
of science? To relieve the hack-work of 
compiling vocabularies and grammars, there 
must be present a sense of wider issues in- 
volved, and such issues as may directly inter- 
est a student devoted to language for its own 
sake. The formal method of investigating 
language, in the meantime, can hardly supply 
the needed spur. Analysis is all very well 
so long as its ultimate purpose is to subserve 
genesis—that is to say, evolutionary history. 
If, however, it tries to set up on its own 
account, it is in danger of degenerating into 


LANGUAGE 137 


sheer futility. Out of time and history is, 
in the long run, out of meaning and use. 
The philologist, then, if he is to help anthro- 
pology, must himself be an anthropologist, 
with a full appreciation of the importance of 
the historical method. He must be able to set 
each language or group of languages that 
he studies in its historical setting. He must 
seek to show how it has evolved in relation 
to the needs of a given time. In short, he 
must correlate words with thoughts; must 
treat language as a function of the social life. 


Here, however, it is not possible to attempt 
any but the most general characterization of 
primitive language as it throws light on the 
workings of the primitive intelligence. For 
one reason, the subject is highly technical; 
for another reason, our knowledge about most 
types of savage speech is backward in the 
extreme; whilst, for a third and most far- 
reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have 
seen, are not speaking the language truly native 
to their powers and habits of mind, but are 
expressing themselves in terms imported from 
another stock, whose spiritual evolution has 
been largely different. Thus it is at most 
possible to contrast very broadly and gener- 
ally the more rudimentary with the more 
advanced .methods that mankind employs 


138 ANTHROPOLOGY 


for the purpose of putting its experience 
into words. Happily the careful attention 
devoted by American philologists to the 
aboriginal languages of their continent has 
resulted in the discovery of certain principles 
which the rest of our evidence, so far as it 
goes, would seem to stamp as of world-wide 
application. The reader is advised to study 
the most stimulating, if perhaps somewhat 
speculative, pages on language in the second 
volume of E. J. Payne’s History of the New 
World called America; or, if he can wrestle 
with the French tongue, to compare the con- 
clusions here reached with those to which 
Professor Lévy-Bruhl is led, largely by the 
consideration of this same American group of 
languages, in his recent work, Les Fonctions 
Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures (‘‘ Mental 
Functions in the Lower Societies ’’). 

If the average man who had not looked 
into the matter at all were asked to say what 
sort of language he imagined a savage to have, 
he would be pretty sure to reply that in the 
first place the vocabulary would be very 
small, and in the second place that it would 
consist of very short, comprehensive terms 
—roots, in fact—such as “‘ man,’’ ‘ bear,”’ 
“eat,” “ kill,”” and so on. Nothing of the 
sort.is actually the case. Take the inhabitants 
of that. cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, 


LANGUAGE 139 


whose culture is as rude as that of any people 
onearth. A scholar who tried to put together 
a dictionary of their language found that he 
had got to reckon with more than thirty 
thousand words, even after suppressing a 
large number of forms of lesser importance. 
And no wonder that the tally mounted up. 
' For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, 
some containing four syllables, to express what 
for us would be either “‘ he “ or “ she ”’; then 
they had two names for the sun, two for the 
moon, and two more for the full moon, each 
of the last-named containing four syllables 
and having no element in common. Sounds, 
in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are 
rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of 
' course, infinite in number. By means of more 
or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian 
society compounds impressions, and that 
somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges 
ideas, which alone are the currency of true 
thought. | 
For instance, I-cut-bear’s-leg-at-the-joint 
with-a-flint-now corresponds fairly well with 
the total impression produced by the par- 
ticular act; though, even so, I have doubtless 
selectively. reduced the notion to something 
I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a lot 
of unnecessary detail—for instance, that I was 
hungry, in’a hurry, doing it for the benefit 


140 ANTHROPOLOGY 


of others as well as myself, and so on. Well, 
American languages of the ruder sort, by 
running a great number of sounds or syllables 
together, manage to utter a portmanteau 
word—“ holophrase ”’ is the. technical name 
for it—into which is packed away enough 
suggestions to reproduce the situation in all 
its detail, the cutting, the fact that I did it, 
the object, the instrument, the time of the 
cutting, and who knows what besides. Amus- 
ing examples of such portmanteau words 
meet one in all the text-books. To go back 
to the Fuegians, their expression mamihla- 
pinatapai is said to mean “to look at each 
other hoping that either will offer to do 
something which both parties desire but are 
unwilling todo.” Now, since exactly the same 
situation never recurs, but is partly the same 
and partly different, it is clear that, if the 
holophrase really tried to hit off in each case 
the whole outstanding impression that a 
given situation provoked, then the same 
combination of sounds would never recur 
either; one could never open one’s mouth 
without coining a new word. Ridiculous as 
this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a 
downward limit from which the rudest types 
of human speech are not so very far removed. 
Their well-known tendency to alter their 
character in a remarkably short time is 


LANGUAGE 141 


due largely to the fluid nature of primitive 
utterance; it being found hard to detach 
portions, capable of repeated use in an 
unchanged form, from the composite vocables 
wherein they register their highly concrete 
experiences. 

Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language 
eschoirhon means “ I- have - been - to- the- 
water,” setsanha “‘ Go-to- the - water,”’ onde - 
quoha “* There - is - water - in - the - bucket,” 
daustantewacharet ‘‘ There - is - water - in - the- 
pot.” In this case there is said to have been 
a common word for “ water,”? awen, which, 
moreover, is somehow suggested to an ab- 
original ear as an element contained in each 
of these longer forms. In many other cases 
the difficulty of isolating the common meaning, 
and fixing it by a common term, has proved 
too much altogether for a primitive language. 
You can express twenty different kinds of 
cutting; but you simply cannot say “cut” 
at all. No wonder that a large vocabulary 
is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, “‘ my 
father,” “‘thy father,” “ his-or-her-father,”’ 
are separate polysyllables without any element 
in common. 

The evolution of language, then, on this 
view, may be regarded as a movement out 
of, and away from, the holophrastic in the 
direction of the analytic. When every piece 


142 ANTHROPOLOGY 


he 


in your play-box of verbal bricks can be 
dealt with separately, because it is not joined 
on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then 
only can you compose new constructions to 
your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown 
by English, and still more conspicuously by 
Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally, 
words should be individual and atomic. 
Every modification they suffer by internal 
change of sound, or by having prefixes or 
suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtail- 
ment of their free use and a sacrifice of 
distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to 
think confusedly, even whilst employing the 
clearest type of language; though in such a 
case it is very hard to do so without being 
quickly brought to book. On the other hand, 
it 1s not feasible to attain to a high degree of 
clear thinking, when the only method of 
speech available is one that tends towards 
wordlessness—that is to say, is relatively 
deficient in verbal forms that preserve their 
identity in all contexts. Wordless thinking 
is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its 
somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost 
wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a 
clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact 
that the words are crystallized into permanent 
shape invests them with a suggestion of 
interrupted continuity, an overtone of un- 


LANGUAGE 143 


utilized significance, that of itself invites the 
mind to play with the corresponding fringe 
of meaning attaching to the concepts that 
the words embody. | 
It would prove an endless task if I were to 
try here to illustrate at ail extensively the 
stickiness, as one might almost call it, of 
primitive modes of speech. Person, number, 
case, tense, mood and gender—all these, even 
in the relatively analytical phraseology of 
the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress 
themselves on the very body of the words 
of which they qualify the sense. But the 
meagre list of determinations thus produced 
in an evolved type of language can yield one 
- no idea,of the vast medley of complicated 
forms that serve the same ends at the lower 
levels of human experience. Moreover, there 
are many other shades of secondary and 
circumstantial meaning which in advanced 
languages are invariably represented by dis- 
tinct words, so that when not wanted they can 
be left out, but in a more primitive tongue 
are apt to run right through the very grammar 
of the sentence, thus mixing themselves up 
inextricably with the really substantial ele- 
ments in the thought to be conveyed. For 
instance, in some American languages, things 
are either animate or inanimate; and must 
be distinguished accordingly by accompany- 


144 ANTHROPOLOGY 


ing particles. Or, again, they are classed 
by similar means as rational or irrational; 
women, by the bye, being designated amongst 
the Chiquitos by the irrational sign. Rever- 
ential particles, again, are used to distinguish 
what is high or low in the tribal estimation; 
and we get in this connection such oddities 
as the Tamil practice of restricting the 
privilege of having a plural to high-caste 
names, such as those applied to gods and 
human beings, as distinguished from the 
beasts, which are mere casteless “ things.” 
Or, once more, my transferable belongings, 
‘“ my-spear,’’ or “ my-canoe,’’ undergo verbal 
modifications which are denied to non-trans- 
ferable possessions such as “‘ my-hand”’; ‘‘ my- 
child,” be it observed, falling within the 
latter class. 

Most interesting of all are distinctions of 
person. These cannot but bite into the 
forms of speech, since the native mind is 
taken up mostly with the personal aspect 
of things, attaining to the conception of a 
bloodless system of “its ’’ with the greatest 
difficulty, if at all. Even the third person, 
which is naturally the most colourless, because 
excluded from a direct part of the conversa- 
tional game, undergoes multitudinous leaven- 
ing in the light of conditions which the 
primitive mind regards as highly important, 


LANGUAGE 145 


whereas we should banish them from our 
thoughts as so much irrelevant “ accident.” 
Thus the Abipones in the first place dis- 
tinguished ‘ he-present,’’ eneha, and “ she- 
present,’ anaha, from “‘ he-absent”’ and “ she- 
absent.’”? But presence by itself gave too 
little of the speaker’s impression. So, if “‘he”’ 
or “she ”’ were sitting, it was necessary to say 
hintha and haneha; if they were walking 
and in sight ehaha and ahaha, but, if walking 
and out of sight, ekaha and akaha; if they 
were lying down, hiriha and haraha, and so 
on. Moreover, these were all “ collective ” 
forms, implying that there were others in- 
volved as well. If “he” or “she” were 
alone in the matter, an entirely different set 
of words was needed, “he-sitting (alone) ”’ 
becoming ynitara, and so forth. The modest 
requirements of Fuegian intercourse have 
called more than twenty such separate pro- 
nouns into being. 

Without attempting to go thoroughly into 
the efforts of primitive speech to curtail its 
interest in the personnel of its world by 
gradually acquiring a stock of de-individual- 
ized words, let us glance at another aspect of 
the subject, because it helps to bring out the 
fundamental fact that language is a social 
product, a means of intersubjective inter- 
course developed within a society that hands 


K 


146 ANTHROPOLOGY 


on to a. new generation the verbal experiments 
that are found to succeed best. Payne shows 
reason for believing that the collective ‘‘ we ” 
precedes “‘I”’ in the order of linguistic 
evolution. To begin with, in America and 
elsewhere, “‘ we ’’ may be inclusive and mean 
‘«all-of-us,”’ or selective, meaning ‘‘ some-of-us- 
only.’’ Hence, we are told, a missionary must 
be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must 
use the inclusive “‘ we” in saying “ we have 
sinned,’ lest the congregation assume that 
only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in 
praying, he must use the selective “ we,” or 
God would be included in the list of sinners. 
Similarly, “I ’’ has a collective form amongst 
some American languages, and this is ordi- 
narily employed, whereas the corresponding 
selective form is used only in special cases. 
Thus if the question be “* Who will help ? ” 
the Apache will reply ‘“ I-amongst-others,”’ 
‘ I-for-one”’; but, if he were recounting his 
own personal exploits, he says sheedah, ‘‘ I-by- 
myself,’ to show that they were wholly his 
own. Here we seem to have group-conscious- 
ness holding its own against individual self- 
consciousness, as being for primitive folk on 
the whole the more normal attitude of mind. 

Another illustration of the sociality en- 
grained in primitive speech is to be found 
in the terms employed to denote relationship. 


LANGUAGE 147 


«‘ My-mother,”’ to the child of nature, is some- 
thing ‘more than an ordinary mother like 
yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there 
may be a special particle applying to blood- 
relations as non-transferable possessions. Or, 
again, one Australian language has special 
duals, “‘ we-two,’”’ one to be used between 
relations generally, another between father 
and child only. Or an American language 
supplies one kind of plural suffix for blood- 
relations, another for the rest of human 
beings. These linguistic concretions are enough 
to show how hard it is for primitive thought 
to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of 
everyday experience. 

No wonder that it is usually found im- 
practicable by the European traveller who 
lacks an anthropological training to extract 
from natives any coherent account of their 
system of relationships; for his questions are 
apt to take the form of “Can a man marry 
his deceased wife’s sister?” or what not. 
Such generalities do not enter at all into the 
highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs 
of his tribe imposed on the savage alike by 
his manner of life and by the very forms 
of his speech. The so-called “ genealogical 
method ” initiated by Dr. Rivers, which the 
scientific explorer now invariably employs, 
rests mainly on the use of a concrete type of 


148 ANTHROPOLOGY 


procedure corresponding to the mental habits 
of the simple folk under investigation. John, 
whom you address here, can tell you exactly 
whether he may, or may not, marry Mary 
Anne over there; also he can point out his 
mother, and tell you her name, and the names 
of his brothers and sisters. You work round 
the whole group—it very possibly contains 
no more than a few hundred members at 
most—and interrogate them one and all about 
their relationships to this and that individual 
whom you name. In course of time you have 
a scheme which you can treat in your own 
analytic way to your heart’s content; whilst 
against your system of reckoning affinity 
you can set up by way of contrast the native 
system; which can always be obtained by 
asking each informant what relationship- 
terms he would apply to the different members 
of his pedigree, and, reciprocally, what terms 
they would each apply to him. 


Before closing this altogether inadequate 
sketch of a vast and intricate subject, I 
would say just one word about the expression 
of ideas of number. It is quite a mistake 
to suppose that savages have no sense of 
number, because the simple-minded European 
traveller, compiling a short vocabulary in 
the usual way, can get no equivalent for our 


LANGUAGE 149 


numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is 
that the numerical interest has taken a 
different turn, incorporating itself with other 
interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic 
forms to which our own type of language 
affords no key at all. Thus in the island of 
Kiwai, at the mouth of the Fly River in New 
‘Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition found a 
whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the 
number of subjects acting on the number of 
objects at a given moment could be concretely 
specified. To indicate the action of two on 
many in the past, they said rudo, in the present 
durudo ; of many on many in the past rumo, 
in the present durumo ; of two on two in the 
past, amarudo, in the present amadurudo ; 
of many on two in the past amarumo; of 
many on three in the past zbidurumo, of many 
on three in the present :bidurudo, of three on 
two in the present, amabidurumo, of three 
on two in the past, amabirumo, and so on. 
Meanwhile, words to serve the purpose of 
pure counting are all the scarcer because 
hands and feet supply in themselves an 
excellent means not only of calculating, but 
likewise of communicating, a number. It is 
the one case in which gesture-language can 
claim something like an independent status 
by the side of speech. 

For the rest, it does not follow that the mind 


150 ANTHROPOLOGY 


fails to appreciate numerical relations, because 
the tongue halts in the matter of symbolizing 
them abstractly. A certain high official, when 
presiding over the Indian census, was informed 
by a subordinate that it was impossible to 
elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account 
of the number of their huts, for the simple 
and sufficient reason that they could not count 
above three. The director, who happened 
to be a man of keen anthropological insight, 
had therefore himself to come to the rescue. 
Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a 
stone on the ground, saymg to one “ This is 
your hut,’? and to another “ This is your 
hut,”? as he placed a second stone a little 
way from the first. “And now where is 
yours ?”’ he asked a third. The natives at 
once entered into the spirit of the game, and 
in a short time there was plotted out a plan 
of the whole settlement, which subsequent 
verification proved to be both geographically 
and numerically correct and complete. This 
story may serve to show how nature supplies 
man with a ready reckoner in his faculty of 
perception, which suffices well enough for 
the affairs of the simpler sort of hfe. One 
knows how a shepherd can take in the numbers 
of a flock at a glance. For the higher flights 
of experience, however, especially when the 
unseen and merely possible has to be dealt 


LANGUAGE : 151 


with, percepts must give way to concepts; 
massive consciousness must give way to 
thinking by means of representations pieced 
together out of elements rendered distinct 
by previous dissection of the total impression ; 
in short, a concrete must give way to an 
analytic way of grasping the meaning of 
things. Moreover, since thinking is little 
more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent 
conversation with oneself, to possess an 
analytic language is to be more than half-way 
on the road to the analytic mode of intelligence 
—the mode of thinking by distinct concepts. 

If there is a moral to this chapter, it must 
be that, whereas it is the duty of the civilized 
overlords of primitive folk to leave them their 
old institutions so far as they are not directly 
prejudicial to their gradual advancement in 
culture, since to lose touch with one’s home- 
world is for the savage to lose heart altogether 
and die; yet this consideration hardly applies 
at all to the native language. If the tongue 
of an advanced people can be substituted, it 
is for the good of ali concerned. It is rather 
the fashion now-a-days amongst anthro- 
pologists to lay it down as an axiom that the 
typical savage and the typical peasant of 
Europe stand exactly on a par in respect to 
their power of general intelligence. If by 
power we are to understand sheer potentiality, 


152 ANTHROPOLOGY 


I know of no sufficient evidence that enables 
us to say whether, under ideal conditions, 
the average degree of mental capacity would 
in the two cases prove the same or different. 
But I am sure that the ordinary peasant of 
Kurope, whose society provides him, in the 
shape of an analytic language, with a ready- 
made instrument for all the purposes of clear 
thinking, starts at an immense advantage, 
as compared with a savage whose traditional 
speech is holophrastic. Whatever be his mental 
power, the former has a much better chance 
of making the most of it under the given 
circumstances. “Give them the words so 
that the ideas may come,” is a maxim that 
will carry us far, alike in the education of 
children, and in that of the peoples of lower 
culture, of whom we have charge. 


CHAPTER VI 
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 


Ir an explorer visits a savage tribe with 
intent to get at the true meaning of their life, 
his first duty, as every anthropologist will tell 
him, is to acquaint himself thoroughly with 
the social organization in all its forms. The 
reason for this is simply that only by studying 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 153 


the outsides of other people can we hope to | 
arrive at what is going on inside them. ‘“* In- 
stitutions ”’ will be found a convenient word 
to express all the externals of the life of man 
in society, so far as they reflect intelligence 
and purpose. Similarly, the internal or sub- 
jective states thereto corresponding may be 
collectively described as “‘beliefs.”” Thus, 
the field-worker’s cardinal maxim can be 
phrased as follows: Work up to the beliefs 
by way of the institutions. 

Further, there are two ways in which a 
given set of institutions can be investigated, 
and of these one, so far as it is practicable, 
should precede the other. First, the institu- 
tions should be examined as so many wheels 
in a social machine that is taken as if it were 
standing still. You simply note the character- 
istic make of each, and how it is placed in 
relation to the rest. Regarded in this static 
way, the institutions appear as “forms of 
social organization.”’ Afterwards, the machine 
is supposed to be set going, and you contem- 
plate the parts in movement. Regarded 
thus dynamically, the institutions appear as 
'* eustoms.” 

In this chapter, then, something will be 
said about the forms of social organization 
prevailing ,.amongst peoples of the lower 
culture. Our interest will be confined to the 


154 ANTHROPOLOGY 


social morphology. In subsequent chapters 
we shall go on to what might be called, 
by way of contrast, the physiology of social 
life. In other words, we shall briefly consider 
the legal and religious customs, together 
with the associated beliefs. 

How do the forms of social organization 
come into being? Does some one invent 
them ? Does the very notion of organization 
imply an organizer ? Or, like Topsy, do they 
simply grow? Are they natural crystalliza- 
tions that take place when people are thrown 
together ? For my own part, I think that, 
so long as we are pursuing anthropology and 
not philosophy—in other words, are piecing 
together events historically according as they 
appear to follow one another, and are not 
, discussing the ultimate question of the rela- 
tion of mind to matter, and which of the two 
in the long run governs which—we must be 
_ prepared to recognize both physical necessity 
and spiritual freedom as interpenetrating fac- 
’ tors in human life. In the meantime, when 
considering the subject of social organiza- 
tion, we shall do well, 1 think, to keep asking 
ourselves all along, How far does force of 
circumstances, and how far does the force 
of intelligent purpose, account for such and 
such a net result ? | 

If I were called upon to exhibit the chief 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 155 


determinants of human life as a single chain 
of causes and effects—a simplification of the 
historical problem, I may say at once, which 
I should never dream of putting forward 
except as a convenient fiction, a device for 
making research easier by providing it with 
a central line—I should do it thus. Working 
backwards, Ishould say that culture depends 
on social organization ; social organization on 
numbers; numbers on food; and food on 
invention. Here both ends of the series are 
represented by spiritual factors—namely, 
culture at the one end, and invention at the 
“ other. Amongst the intermediate links, food 
and numbers may be reckoned as physical 
factors. Social organization, however, seems 
to face in both directions at once, and to be 
something half-way between a spiritual and 
a physical manifestation. 

In placing invention at the bottom of the 
scale of conditions, I definitely break with 
the opinion that human evolution is through- 
out a purely “natural” process. Of course, 
you can use the word “natural” so widely 
and vaguely as to cover everything that was, 
or is, or could be. If it be used, however, 
so as to exclude the “‘ artificial,’ then I am 
prepared to say that human life is pre- 
eminently ‘an artificial construction, or, in 
other words, a work of art; the distinguishing 


156 ANTHROPOLOGY 


mark of man consisting precisely in the fact 
that he alone of the animals is capable of 
art. 

It is well known how the invention of 
machinery in the middle of the eighteenth 
century brought about that industrial revo- 
lution, the social and political effects of which 
are still developing at this hour. Well, I 
venture to put it forward as a proposition 
which applies to human evolution, so far back 
as our evidence goes, that history is the 
history of great inventions. Of course, it is 
true that climate and geographical conditions 
in general help to determine the nature and 
quantity of the food-supply; so that, for 
instance, however much versed you may be 
in the art of agriculture, you cannot get corn 
to grow on the shores of the Arctic sea. But, 
given the needful inventions, superior weapons 
for instance, you need never allow yourselves 
to be shoved away into such an inhospitable 
region; to which you presumably do not 
retire voluntarily, unless, indeed, the state 
of your arts—for instance, your skill in hunt- 
ing or taming the reindeer—inclines you to 
make a paradise of the tundra. 

Suppose it granted, then, that a given 
people’s arts and inventions, whether directly 
or indirectly productive, are capable of a 
certain average yield of food, it is certain, 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 157 


as Malthus and Darwin would remind us, 
that human fertility can be reckoned on to 
bring the numbers up to a limit bearing a 
more or less constant ratio to the means of 
subsistence. 

At length we reach our more immediate 
subject—namely, social organization. In what 
sense, if any, is social organization dependent 
on numbers? Unfortunately, it is too large 
a question to thrash out here. I may, how- 
ever, refer the reader to the ingenious classi- 
fication of the peoples of the world, by refer- 
ence to the degree of their social organization 
and culture, which is attempted by Mr. 
Sutherland in his Origin and Growth of the 
Moral Instinct. He there tries to show that 
a certain size of population can be correlated 
with each grade in the scale of human evolu- 
tion—at any rate up to the point at which 
full-blown civilization is reached, when cases 
like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence 
under the Medici, would probably cause him 
some trouble. For instance, he makes out 
that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, 
and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; 
whereas those who are but one degree less 
backward, such as the Australian natives, 
average from fifty to two hundred; whilst 
most of the North American tribes, who repre- 
sent the next stage of general advance, run 


158 ANTHROPOLOGY 


from a hundred up to five hundred. At this 
point he takes leave of the peoples he would 
class as “ savage,”’ their leading characteristic 
from the economic point of view being that 
they lead the more or less wandering life of 
hunters or of mere “ gatherers.” He then 
goes on to arrange similarly, in an ascending 
series of three divisions, the peoples that he 
terms “ barbarian.’’ Economically they are 
either sedentary, with a more or less developed 
agriculture, or, if nomad, pursue the pastoral 
mode of life. His lowest type of group, 
which includes the Iroquois, Maoris, and so 
forth, ranges from one thousand to five thou- 
sand; next come loosely organized states, 
such as Dahomey or Ashanti, where the 
numbers may reach one hundred thousand; 
whilst he makes barbarism culminate in more 
firmly compacted communities, such as are 
to be found, for example, in Abyssinia or 
Madagascar, the population of which he places 
at about half a million. 

Now I am very sceptical about Mr. Suther- 
land’s statistics, and regard his bold attempt 
to assign the world’s peoples each to their 
own rung on the ladder of universal culture 
as, in the present state of our knowledge, no 
more than a clever hypothesis; which some 
keen anthropologist of the future might find 
it well worth his while to put thoroughly to 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 159 


the test. At a guess, however, I am disposed 
to accept his general principle that, on the 
whole and in the long run, during the earlier 
stages of human evolution, the complexity 
and coherence of the social order follow upon 
' the size of the group; which, since its size, 
in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic 
life, may be described as the food-group. 
Besides food, however, there is a seeond 
elemental condition which vitally affects the 
human race; and that is sex. Social organi- 
zation thus comes to have a twofold aspect. 
On the one hand, and perhaps primarily, it 
is an organization of the food-quest. On the 
other hand, hardly less fundamentally, it is 
an organization of marriage. In what follows, 
the two aspects will be considered more or 
less together, as to a large extent they over- 
lap. Primitive men, like other social animals, 
hang together naturally in the hunting pack, 
and no less naturally in the family; and at 
a very rudimentary stage of evolution 
there probably is very little distinction 
between the two. When, however, for some 
reason or other which anthropologists have 
still to discover, man takes to the institution 
of exogamy, the law of marrying-out, which 
forces men and women to unite who are 
members of more or less distinct food-groups, 
then, as we shall presently see, the matri- 


160 ANTHROPOLOGY 


monial aspect of social organization tends to 
overshadow the politico-economic; if only 
because the latter can usually take care of 
itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger 
is an embarrassing operation that might be 
expected to require a certain amount of 
arrangement on both sides. 


To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of 
human society is not so easy as it may seem; 
for, though it is possible to find examples, 
especially amongst Negritos such as_ the 
Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of 
the rudest culture, and living in very small 
communities, who apparently know neither 
exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, 
namely, totemism, we can never be certain 
whether we are dealing in such a case with 
the genuinely primitive, or merely with the 
degenerate. For instance, the chapter on 
the forms of social organization in Professor 
Hobhouse’s Morals in Evolution starts off 
with an account of the system in vogue 
amongst the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle, 
his description being founded on the excellent 
observations of the brothers Sarasin. Now 
it is perfectly true that some of the Veddas 
appear to afford a perfect instance of what is 
sometimes called “the natural family.”” A 
tract of a few miles square forms the beat of 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 161 


a small group of families, four or five at most, 
which, for the most part, singly or in pairs, 
wander round hunting, fishing, gathering 
honey and digging up the wild yams; whilst 
they likewise take shelter together in shallow 
* eaves, where a roof, a piece of skin to lie on— 
though this is not essential—and, that most 
precious luxury of all, a fire, represent, apart 
from food, the sum total of their creature 
comforts. _ 

Now, under these circumstances, it is not, 
perhaps, wonderful that the relationships 
within a group should be decidedly close. 
Indeed, the correct thing is for the children 
-of a brother and sister to marry; though 
not, it would seem, for the children of 
two brothers or of two sisters. And yet 
there is no approach to promiscuity, but, on 
the contrary, a very strict monogamy, infi- 
delities being as rare as they are deeply 
resented. That they had clans of some sort 
was, indeed, known to Professor Hobhouse and 
to the authorities whom he follows; but these 
clans are dismissed as having but the slightest 
organization and very few functions. An 
entirely new light, however, has been thrown 
on the meaning of this clan-system by the 
recent researches of Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann. 
It now turns out that some of the Veddas are 


exogamous—that is to say, are obliged by 
L 


162 ANTHROPOLOGY 


custom to marry outside their own clan— 
though others are not. The question then 
arises, Which, for the Veddas, is the older 
system, marrying-out or marrying-in ? Seeing 
what a miserable remnant the Veddas are, I 
cannot but believe that we have here the case 
of a formerly exogamous people, groups of 
which have been forced to marry-in, simply 
because the alternative was not to marry at 
all. Of course, it is possible to argue that in 
so doing they merely reverted to what was 
once everywhere the primeval condition of 
man. But at this point historical science 
tails off into mere guesswork. 


We reach relatively firm ground, on the 
other hand, when we pass on to consider the 
social organization of such exogamous and 
totemic peoples as the natives of Australia. 
The only trouble here is that the subject is 
too vast and complicated to permit of a hand- 
ling at once summary and simple. Perhaps 
the most useful thing that can be done for 
the reader in a short space is to provide him 
with a few elementary distinctions, applying 
not only to the Australians, but more or less 
to totemic societies in general. With the 
help of these he may proceed to grapple for 
himself with the mass of highly interesting 
but bewildering details concerning social 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 163 


organization to be found in any of the lead- 
ing first-hand authorities. For instance, for 
Australia he can do no better than consult the 
two fascinating works of Messrs. Spencer and 
_ Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no less illu- 
minating volume of Howitt on the natives 
of the South-eastern region; whilst for North 
America there are many excellent mono- 
graphs to choose from amongst those issued 
by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian 
Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some 
one else to collect the material for him, his 
best plan will be to consult Dr. Frazer’s 
monumental treatise, Totemism and Exogamy, 
which epitomizes the known facts for the 

whole wide world, as surveyed region by region. 
_ The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples 
of this type, social organization is, primarily 
and on the face of it, identical with kinship- 
organization. Before proceeding further, let 
us see what kinship means. Distinguish 
kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity 
is a physical fact. It depends on _ birth, 
and covers all one’s real blood-relationships, 
whether recognized by society or not. Kin- 
ship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. 
It depends on the conventional system of 
counting descent. Thus it may exclude real 
relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may 
include such as are purely fictitious, as when 


164 ANTHROPOLOGY 


some one is allowed by law to adopt a child 
as if it were his own. Now, under civilized 
conditions, though there is, as we have just 
seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, 
again, there is the case of the illegitimate 
child, who can claim consanguinity, but can 
never, in English law at least, attain to kin- 
ship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious 
of the difference between the genuine blood-tie 
and the social institution that is modelled 
more or less closely upon it. In primitive 
society, however, consanguinity tends to be 
wider than kinship by as much again. In 
other words, in the recognition of kinship one 
entire side of the family is usually left clean 
out of account. A man’s kin comprises either 
his mother’s people or his father’s people, but 
not both. Remember that, by the law of 
exogamy, the father and mother are strangers 
to each other. Hence, primitive society, as it 
were, issues a judgment of Solomon to the 
effect that, since they are not prepared to 
halve their child, it must belong body and 
soul either to one party or to the other. 

We may now go on to analyse this one- 
sided type of kinship-organization. a little 
more fully. There are three elementary 
principles that combine to produce it. They 
are exogamy, lineage and totemism. A word 
must be said about each in turn. 


_ SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 165 


Exogamy presents no difficulty until you 
try to account for its origin. It simply means 
marrying-out, in contrast to endogamy, or 
marrying-in. Suppose there were a villagecom- 
posed entirely of McIntyres and McIntoshes, 
and suppose that fashion compelled every 
McIntyre to marry a McIntosh, and every 
McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an 
outsider, say a McBean, was bad form for 
McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; then the 
two clans would be exogamous in respect to 
each other, whereas the village as a whole 
would be endogamous. 

Lineage is the principle of reckoning 
descent along one or other of two lines— 
namely, the mother’s line or the father’s. 
The former method is termed matrilineal, 
the latter patrilineal. It sometimes, but by 
no means invariably, happens, when descent 
is counted matrilineally, that the wife stays 
with her people, and the husband has the 
status of a mere visitor and alien. In such 
a case the marriage is called matrilocal; 
otherwise it is patrilocal. Again, when the 
matrilocal type of marriage prevails, as like- 
wise often when it does not, the wife and her 
people, rather than the father and his people, 
exercise supreme authority over the children, 
This is known as the matripotestal, as con- 
trasted with the patripotestal, type of family. 


166 ANTHROPOLOGY 


When the matrilineal, matrilocal and matri- 
potestal conditions are found together, we 
have mother-right at its fullest and strongest. 
Where we get only two out of the three, or 
merely the first by itself, most authorities 
would still speak of mother-right; though it 
may be questioned how far the word mother- 
right, or the corresponding, now almost dis- 
carded, expression, “‘ the matriarchate,” can 
be safely used without further explanation, 
since it tends to imply a right (in the legal 
sense) and an authority, which in these cir- 
cumstances is often no more than nominal. 
Totemism, in the specific form that has to 
do with kinship, means that a social group de- 
pends for its identity on a certain intimate and 
exclusive relation in which it stands towards 
an animal-kind, or a plant-kind, or, more 
rarely, a class of inanimate objects, cr, very 
rarely, something that is individual and not a 
kind or class at all. Such a totem, in the first 
place, normally provides the social group with 
its name. (The Boy Scouts, who call them- 
selves Foxes, Peewits, and so on, according to 
their different patrols, have thus reverted to a 
very ancient usage.) In the second place, this 
name tends to be the outward and visible 
sign of an inward and spiritual grace that, 
somehow flowing from the totem to the totem- 
ites, sanctifies their communion. They are 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 167 


29 


** all-one-flesh *? with one another, as certain 
of the Australians phrase it, because they are 
*‘ all-one-flesh *” with the totem. Or, again, 
a man whose totem was ngaui, the sun, said 
that his name was ngaui and he ‘“ was” 
ngaui ; though he was equally ready to put 
it in another way, explaining that ngaui 
“owned ’’ him. If we wish to express the 
matter comprehensively, and at the same 
time to avoid language suggestive of a 
more advanced mysticism, we may perhaps 
describe the totem as, from this point of 
view, the totemite’s “luck.” 

There is considerable variation, however, 
to be found in the practices and beliefs of a 
more or less religious kind that are associated 
with this form of totemism; though almost 
always there are some. Sometimes the totem 
is thought of as an ancestor, or as the common 
fund of life out of which the totemites are 
born and into which they go back when they 
die. Sometimes the totem is held to be a 
very present help in time of trouble, as when 
a kangaroo, by hopping along in a special way, 
warns the kangaroo-man of impending danger. 
Sometimes, on the other hand, the kangaroo- 
man thinks of himself mainly as the helper 
of the kangaroo, holding ceremonies in order 
that the kangaroos may wax fat and multiply. 
Again, almost invariably the totemite shows 


168 ANTHROPOLOGY 


some respect towards his totem, refraining, 
for instance, from slaying and eating the 
totem-animal, unless it be in some specially 
solemn and sacramental way. 

The upshot of these considerations is that if 
the totem js, on the face of it, a name, the savage 
answers the question, “ What’s in a name?” 
by finding inthe name that makes him one 
with his brethren a wealth of mystic meaning, 
such as deepens for him the feeling of social 
solidarity to an extent that it takes a great 
effort on our part to appreciate. 

Having separately examined the three prin- 
ciples of exogamy, lineage and totemism, we 
must now try to see how they work to- 
gether. Generalization in regard to these 
matters is extremely risky, not to say rash; 
nevertheless, the following broad statements 
may serve the reader as working hypotheses, 
that he can go on to test for himself by 
looking into the facts. Firstly, exogamy and 
totemism, whether they be in origin distinct 
or not, tend in practice to go pretty closely 
together. Secondly, lineage, or the one-sided 
system of reckoning descent, is more or less 
independent of the other two principles.’ 


-1 That is to say, either mother-right or father-right in 
any of their forms may exist in conjunction with exogamy 
and totemism. It is certainly not the fact that, wherever 
totemism is in a state of vigour, mother-right is regularly 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION _169 


If, instead of consulting the evidence that 
is to hand about the savage world as it exists 
to-day, you read some book crammed full 
with theories about social origins, you prob- 
ably come away with the impression that 
totemic society is entirely an affair of clans. 
Some such notion as the following is precipi- 
tated in your mind. You figure to yourself 
two small food-groups, whose respective beats 
are, let us say, on each side of a river. For 
some unknown reason they are totemic, one 
group calling itself Cockatoo, the other calling 
itself Crow, whilst each feels in consequence 
that its members are “ all-one-flesh ’? in some 
mysterious and moving sense. Again, for 
some unknown reason each is exogamous, 
so that matrimonial alliances are bound to 
take place across the river. Lastly, each has 
mother-right of the full-blown kind. The 
Cockatoo-girls and the Crow-girls abide each 
on their own side of the river, where they are. 
visited by partners from across the water; who, 
whether they tend to stay and make them- 
selves useful, or are merely intermittent in 
their attentions, remain outsiders from the 
totemic point of view and are treated as such. 


found. At most it may be urged in favour of the priority 
of mother-right that, if there is change, it is invariably 
from mother-right to father-right, and never the other way 
about. 


170 ANTHROPOLOGY 


The children, meanwhile, grow up in the 
Cockatoo and Crow quarters respectively as 
little Cockatoos or Crows. If they need to 
be chastised, a Cockatoo hand, not necessarily 
the mother’s, but perhaps her brother’s— 
never the father’s, however—administers the 
slap. When they grow up, they take their 
chances for better and worse with the mother’s 
people; fighting when they fight, though it 
be against the father’s people; sharing in the 
toils and the spoils of the chase; inheriting 
the weapons and any other property that is 
handed on from one generation to another; 
and, last but not least, taking part in the 
totemic mysteries that disclose to the elect 
the inner meaning of being a Cockatoo or a 
Crow, as the case may be. 

Now such a picture of the original clan 
and of the original inter-clan organization is 
very pretty and easy to keep in one’s head. 
And when one is. simply guessing about the 
first beginnings of things, there is something 
to be said for starting from some highly 
abstract and simple concept, which is after- 
wards elaborated by additions and qualifica- 
tions until the developed notion comes near 
to matching the complexity of the real facts. 
Such speculations, then, are quite permissible 
and even necessary in their place. To do 
justice, however, to the facts about totemic 


' SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 171 


society, as known tous by actual observation, 
it remains to note that the clan is by no means 
the only form of social organization that it 
displays. 

The clan, it is true, whether matrilineal 
or patrilineal, tends at the totemic level of 
society to eclipse the family. The natural 
family, of course—that is to say, the more or 
less permanent association of father, mother 
and children, is always there in some shape 
and to some extent. But, so long as the 
one-sided method of counting descent prevails, 
and is reinforced by totemism, the family 
cannot attain to the dignity of a formally 
recognized institution. On the other hand, 
the totemic clan, of all the formally recognized 
groupings of society to which an individual 
belongs in virtue of his birth and kinship, 
is, so to speak, the most specific. As the 
Australian puts it, it makes him what he 
“*is.”? His social essence is to be a Cockatoo 
or a Crow. Consequently his first duty is 
towards his clan and its members, human 
and not-human. Wherever there are clans, 
and so long as there is any totemism worthy 
of the name, this would seem to be the general 
law. 

Besides the specific unity, however, pro- 
vided by the clan, there are wider, and, as it 
were, more generic unities into which a man is 


172 ANTHROPOLOGY 


born, in totemic society of the complex type 
that is found in the actual world of to-day. 
First, he belongs to a phratry. In Aus- 
tralia the tribe—a term to be defined pre- 
sently—is nearly always split up into two 
exogamous divisions, which it is usual to call 
phrairies.1 Then, in some of the Australian 
tribes, the phratry is subdivided into two, 
and, in others, into four portions, between 
which exogamy takes place according to a 
curious criss-cross scheme. ‘These exogamous 
subdivisions, which are peculiar to Australia, 
are known as matrimonial classes. Dr. Frazer 
thinks that they are the result of deliberate 
arrangement on the part of native statesmen ; 
and certainly he is right in his contention 
that there is an artificial and man-made look 
about them. The system of -phratries, on 
the other hand, whether it carves up the tribe. 
into two, or, as sometimes in North America 
and elsewhere, into more than two primary 
divisions, under which the clans tend to group 
themselves in a more or less orderly way, 
has all the appearance of a natural develop- 
ment out of the clan-system. Thus, to revert 
to the imaginary case of the Cockatoos and 
Crows practising exogamy across the river, 
it seems easy to understand how the numbers 


? From a Greek word meaning “ brotherhood,” which 
was applied to a very similar institution. 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 173 


on both sides might increase until, whilst 
remaining Cockatoos and Crows for cross- 
river purposes, they would find it necessary 
to adopt among themselves subordinate dis- 
tinctions; such as would be sure to model 
themselves on the old Cockatoo-Crow principle 
of separate totemic badges. But we must 
not wander off into questions of origin. It 
is enough for our present purpose to have 
noted the fact that, within the tribe, there 
are normally other forms of social grouping 
into which a man is born, as well as the clan. 
Now we come to the tribe. This may be 
described as the political unit. Its constitu- 
tion tends to be lax and its functions vague. 
One way of seizing its nature is to think of 
it as the social union within which exogamy 
takes place. The intermarrying groups natur- 
ally hang together, and are thus in their 
entirety endogamous, in the sense that 
marriage with pure outsiders is disallowed 
by custom. Moreover, by mingling in this 
way, they are likely to attain to the use of 
a common dialect, and a common name, 
speaking of themselves, for instance, as *‘ the 
men,’ and lumping the rest of humanity 
together as “foreigners.” To act together, 
however, as, for instance, in war, in order 
to repel incursions on the part of the said 
foreigners, is not easy without some definite 


174 ANTHROPOLOGY 


organization. In Australia, where there is 
very little war, this organization is mostly 
wanting. In North America, on the other 
hand, amongst the more advanced and war- 
like tribes, we find regular tribal officers, and 
some approach to a political constitution. 
Yet in Australia there is at least one occasion 
when a sort of tribal gathering takes place— 
namely, when their elaborate ceremonies for 
the initiation of the youths is being held. 

It would seem, however, that these cere- 
monies are, as often as not, intertribal rather 
than tribal. So similar are the customs and 
beliefs over wide areas, that groups with 
apparently little or nothing else in common 
will assemble together, and take part in 
proceedings that are something like a Pan- 
Anglican Congress and a World’s Fair rolled 
into one. To this indefinite type of inter- 
tribal association the term “nation”’ is some- 
times applied. Only when there is definite 
organization, as never in Australia, and only 
occasionally in North America, as amongst 
the Iroquois, can we venture to describe it as 
a genuine “‘ confederacy.” 

No doubt the reader’s head is already in 
a whirl, though I have perpetrated endless 
sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commis- 
sion as well, in order to simplify the glorious 
confusion of the subject of the social organi- 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 175 


zation prevailing in what is conveniently but 
loosely lumped together as totemic society. 
Thus, I have omitted to mention that some- 
times the totems seem to have nothing to 
do at all with the social organization; as, 
for example, amongst the famous Arunta 
of central Australia, whom Messrs. Spencer 
and Gillen have so carefully described. I 
have, again, refrained from pointing out that 
sometimes there are exogamous divisions— 
some would call them moieties to distinguish 
them from phratries—which have no clans 
grouped under them, and, on the other hand, 
have themselves little or no resemblance to 
totemic clans. These, and ever so many 
other exceptional cases, I have simply passed 
by. 

An even more serious kind of omission is 
the following. I have throughout identified 
the social organization with the kinship 
organization—namely, that into which a man 
is born in consequence of the marriage laws 
and the system of reckoning descent. But 
there are other secondary features of what 
can only be classed as social organization, 
which have nothing to do with kinship. Sex, 
for instance, has a direct bearing on social 
status. The men and the women often form 
markedly distinct groups; so that we are 
almost reminded of the way in which the male 


176 ANTHROPOLOGY 


and the female linnets go about in separate 
flocks as soon as the pairing season is over. 
Of course, disparity of occupation has some- 
thing to do withit. But, for the native mind, 
the difference evidently goes far deeper than 
that. In some parts of Australia there are 
actually sex-totems, signifying that each sex 
is all-one-flesh, a mystic corporation. And, 
all the savage world over, there is a feeling 
that woman is uncanny, a thing apart, which 
feeling is probably responsible for most of the 
special disabilities—and the special privileges 
—that are the lot of woman at the present 
day. 

Again, age likewise has considerable in- 
fluence on social status. It is not merely a 
case of being graded as a youth until once for 
all you legally “ come of age,” and are enrolled 
amongst the men. The grading of ages is 
frequently most elaborate, and each batch 
mounts the social ladder step by step. Just 
as, at the university, each year has apportioned 
to it by publie opinion the things it may do 
and the things it may not do, whilst, later on, 
the bachelor, the master, and the doctor 
stand each a degree higher in respect of 
academic rank; so in darkest Australia, from 
youth up to middle age at least, a man will 
normally undergo a progressive initiation 
into the secrets of life, accompanied by a 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 177 


steady widening in the sphere of his social 
duties and rights. 

Lastly, locality affects status, and in- 
creasingly as the wandering life gives way to 
stable occupation. Amongst a few hundred 
people who are never out of touch with each 
other, the forms of natal association hold their 
- own against any that local association is 
likely to suggest in their place. According 
to natal grouping, therefore, in the broad 
- sense that includes sex and age no less than 
kinship, the members of the tribe camp, fight, 
perform magical ceremonies, play games, are 
initiated, are married, and are buried. But 
let the tribe increase in numbers, and spread 
through a considerable area, over the face 
- of which communications are difficult and 
proportionately rare. Instantly the local 
group tends to become all in all. Authority 
and initiative must always rest with the men 
on the spot; and the old natal combinations, 
weakened by inevitable absenteeism, at last 
cease to represent the true framework of 
the social order. They tend to linger on, of 
course, in the shape of subordinate institu- 
tions. For instance, the totemic groups 
cease to have direct connection with the mar- 
riage system, and, on the strength of the 
ceremonies associated with them, develop 
into what are known as secret societies. Or, 


M 


178 ANTHROPOLOGY 


again, the clan is gradually overshadowed by 
the family, so that kinship, with its rights and 
duties, becomes practically limited to the 
nearer blood-relations; who, moreover, begin 
to be treated for practical purposes as kins- 
men, even when they are on the side of the 
family which lineage does not officially 
recognize. ‘Thus the forms of natal associa- 
tion no longer constitute the backbone of 
the body politic. Their public importance 
has gone. MHenceforward, the social unit is 
the local group. The territorial principle 
comes more and more to determine affinities 
and functions. Kinship has dethroned itself 
by its very success. Thanks to the organizing 
power of kinship, primitive society has grown, 
and by growing has stretched the birth-tie 
until it snaps: Some relationships become 
distant in a local and territorial sense, and 
thereupon they cease to count. My duty to- 
wards my kin passes into my duty towards 
my neighbour. 


Reasons of space make it impossible to sur- 
vey the further developments to which social 
organization is subject under the sway of 
locality. Itis, perhaps, less essential to insist — 
on them here, because, whereas totemic society 
is a thing which we civilized folk have the 
very greatest difficulty in understanding, we 


SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 179 


all have direct insight into the meaning of a 
territorial arrangement ; since, from the village 
community up to the modern state, the same 
fundamental type of social structure obtains 
throughout. 

Besides local contiguity, however, there is 
a second principle which greatly helps to 
shape the social order, as soon as society is 
sufficiently advanced in its arts and industries 
to have taken firm root, so to speak, on the 
earth’s surface. This is the principle of 
private property, and especially of private 
property in land. The most fundamental 
of class distinctions is that between rich and 
poor. That between free and slave, in com- 
munities that have slavery, is not at first 
sight strictly parallel, since there may be a 
class of poor freemen intermediate between 
the nobles and the slaves; but it is obvious 
that in this case, too, private property is really 
responsible for the mode of grading. Or 
sometimes social position may seem to depend 
primarily on industrial occupation, the Indian 
caste-system providing an instance in point. 
Since, however, the most honourable occupa- 
tions in the long run coincide with those that 
pay best, we come back once again to private 
property as the ultimate source of social 
rank, under an economic system of the more 
developed kind. 


180 | ANTHROPOLOGY 


In this brief sketch it has been impossible 
to do more than hint how social organization 
is relative to numbers, which in their turn 
are relative to the skill with which the food- 
quest is carried on. But if, up to a certain 
point, it be true that the structure of society 
depends on its mass in a more or less physical 
way, there is to be borne in mind another 
aspect of the matter, which also has been 
hinted at as we went rapidly along. A good 
deal of intelligence has throughout helped 
towards the establishing of the social order. 
If social organization is in part a natural 
result of the expansion of the population, it 
is partly also, in the best sense of the word, 
an artificial creation of the human mind, 
which has exerted itself to devise modes of 
grouping whereby men might be enabled to 
work together in larger and ever larger wholes. 

Regarded, however, in the purely external 
way which a study of its mere structure 
involves, society appears as a machine—that is 
to say, appears as the work of intelligence 
indeed, but not as itself instinct with intelli- 
gence. In what follows we shall set the social 
machine moving. Weshall then have a better 
chance of obtaining an inner view of the 
driving power. We shall find that we have to 
abandon the notion that society is a machine. 


~<—Tt is more, even, than an organism. It is‘a 


LAW 181 


communion of souls—souils that, as so many 
indeperident, yet interdependent, manifesta- 
tions of the life-force, are pressing forward 
in the search for individuality and freedom. 


CHAPTER VII 
LAW 


_ THE general plan of this little book being 
to. start from the influences that determine 
man’s destiny in a physical, external, necessary 
sort of way, and to work up gradually to the 
spiritual, internal, voluntary factors in human 
_ nature—that strange ** compound of clay and 
flame ’’-——it seems advisable to consider law 
before religion, and religion before morality, 
whether in its collective or individual aspect, 
for the following reason. ‘There is more sheer 
constraint to be discerned in law than in 
religion, whilst religion, in the historical sense 
which identifies it with organized cult, is more 
coercive in its mode of regulating hfe than 
the mora! reason, which compels by force of 
persuasion. 

To one who lives under civilized conditions 
the phrase “the strong arm of the law” 
inevitably suggests the policeman. Apart 
from policemen, magistrates, and the soldiers 


182 ANTHROPOLOGY 


who in the last resort must be called out to 
enforce the decrees of the community, it 
might appear that law could not exist. And 
certainly it is hard to admit that what is known 
as mob-law is any law at all. For historical 
purposes, however, we must be prepared to 
use the expression “law” rather widely. 
We must be ready to say that there is law 
wherever there is punishment on the part of a 
human society, whether acting in the mass, 
or through its representatives. Punishment 
means the infliction of pain on one who is 
judged to have broken a social rule. Con- 
versely, then, a law is any social rule to the 
infringement of which punishment is by usage 
attached. So long as it is recognized that a 
man breaks a social rule at the risk of pain, 
and that it is the business of everybody, or of 
somebody armed with the common authority, 
to make that risk a reality for the offender, 
there is law within the meaning of the term as 
it exists for anthropology. 

Punishment, however, is by its very nature 
an exceptional measure. It is only because 
the majority are content to follow a social ' 
rule, that law and punishment are possible at 
all. If, again, every one habitually obeys the 
social rules, law ceases to exist, because it is 
unnecessary. Now, one reason why it is hard 
to find any law in primitive society is because, 


LAW 183 


in a general way of speaking, no one dreams 
of breaking the social rules. 

Custom is king, nay tyrant, in primitive 
society. When Captain Cook asked the chiefs 
of Tahiti why they ate apart and alone, they 
simply replied, ‘‘ Because it is right.”” And so 
. it always is with the ruder peoples. “ ’Tis 
the custom, and there’s an end on’t”’ is their 
notion of a sufficient reason in politics and 
ethics alike. Now that way lies a rigid con- 
servatism. In the chapter on morality we 
shall try to discover its inner springs, its 
psychological conditions. For the present, 
we may be content to regard custom from the 
outside, as the social habit of conserving all 
_ traditional practices for their own sake and 
regardless of consequences. Of course, changes 
are bound to occur, and do occur. But they 
are not supposed to occur. In theory, the 
social rules of primitive society are like “‘ the 
law of the Medes and Persians which altereth 
not.” 

This absolute respect for custom has its 
good and its bad sides. On the one hand, it 
supplies the element of discipline; without 
which any society is bound soon to fall to 
pieces. We are apt to think of the savage as 
a freakish creature, all moods—at one moment 
a friend, at the next moment a fiend. So he 
might be, if it were not for the social drill 


184 ANTHROPOLOGY 


imposed by his customs. So he is, if you 
destroy his customs, and expect him neverthe- 
less to behave as an educated and reasonable 
being. Given, then, a primitive society in a 
healthy and’ uncontaminated condition, its 
members will invariably be found to be on the 
average more law-abiding, as judged from the 
standpoint of their own law, than is the case 
in any civilized state. 

But now we come to the bad side of custom. 
Its conserving influence extends to all tradi- 
tional practices, however unreasonable or 
perverted. In that amber any fly is apt to 
be enclosed. Hence the whimsicalities of 
savage custom. In Primitive Culture Sir E. 
Tylor tells a good story about the Dyaks of 
Borneo. The white man’s way of chopping 
down a tree by notching out V-shaped cuts 
was not according to Dyak custom. Hence 
any Dyak caught imitating the European 
fashion was punished by a fine. And yet so 
well aware were they that this method was an 
improvement on their own that, when they 
could trust each other not to tell, they would 
surreptitiously use it. These same Dyaks, it 
may be added, are, according to Mr. A. R. 
Wallace, the best of observers, “‘ among the 
most pleasing of savages.’’ They are good- 
natured, mild, and by no means bloodthirsty 
in the ordinary relations of life. Yet they are 


LAW 185 


well known to be addicted to the horrid 
practice of head-hunting. ‘“‘ It was a custom,” 
Mr. Wallace explains, “‘ and as a custom was 
observed, but it did not imply any extra- 
ordinary barbarism or moral delinquency.” 
The drawback, then, to a reign of pure 
custom is this: Meaningless injunctions 
abound, since the value of a traditional practice 
does not depend on its consequences, but 
simply on the fact that it is the practice; and 
this element of irrationality is enough to 
perplex, till it utterly confounds, the mind 
capable of rising above routine and reflecting 
on the true aims and ends of the social life. 
How to break through “‘ the cake of custom,”’ 
as Bagehot has called it, is the hardest lesson 
that humanity has ever had to learn. Cus- 
toms have often been broken up by the clash- 
ing of different societies; but im that case they 
merely crystallize again into newshapes. But 
to break through custom by the sheer force 
of reflection, and so to make rational progress 
possible, was the intellectual feat of one 
people, the ancient Greeks; and it is at least 
highly doubtful if, without their leadership, 
a progressive civilization would have existed 
to-day.’ | 
It may be added in parenthesis that customs 
may linger on indefinitely, after losing, through 
one cause or another, their place amongst the 


186 ANTHROPOLOGY 


vital interests of the community. They are, 
or at any rate seem, harmless; their function 
is spent. Hence, whilst perhaps the humbler 
folk still take them more or less seriously, the 
leaders of society are not at pains to suppress 
them. Nor would they always find it easy to 
do so. Something of the primeval man lurks 
in us all; and these “ survivals,” as they are 
termed by the anthropologist, may often in 
large part correspond to impulses that are by 
no means dead in us, but rather sleep; and 
are hence liable to be reawakened, if the 
environment happens to supply the appro- 
priate stimulus. Witness the fact that sur- 
vivals, especially when the whirligig of social 
change brings the uneducated temporarily 
to the fore, have a way of blossoming forth 
into revivals; and the state may in conse- 
quence have to undergo something equivalent 
to an operation for appendicitis. The study 
of so-called survivals, therefore, is a most 
important branch of anthropology, which can- 
not unfortunately in this hasty sketch be given 
its due. It would seem to coincide with the 
central interest of what is known as folk-lore. 
Folk-lore, however, tends to broaden out till 
it becomes almost indistinguishable from 
general anthropology. There are at least two 
reasons for this. Firstly, the survivals of 
custom amongst advanced nations, such as 


LAW 187 


the ancient Greeks or the modern British, are 
to be interpreted mainly by comparison with 
the similar institutions still flourishing amongst 
ruder peoples. Secondly, all these ruder 
peoples themselves, without exception, have 
their survivals too. Their customs fall as 
it were into two layers. On top is the live 
part of the fire. Underneath are smouldering 
ashes, which, though dying out on the whole, 
are yet liable here and there to rekindle into 
flame. 

So much for custom as something on the 
face of it distinct from law, inasmuch as it 
seems to dispense with punishment. It re- 
mains to note, however, that brute force lurks 
behind custom, in the form of what Bagehot 
has called “ the persecuting tendency.”’ Just 
as a boy at school who happens to offend 
_ against the unwritten code has his life made 
a burden by the rest of his mates, so in the 
primitive community the fear of a rough 
handling causes “‘I must not” to wait upon 
‘“T dare not.” One has only to read Mr. 
Andrew Lang’s instructive story of the fate 
of “* Why Why, the first Radical,” to realize 
how amongst savages—and is it so very 
different amongst ourselves ?—it pays much 
better to be respectable than to play the moral 
hero. 


188 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Let us pass on to examine the beginnings of 
punitive law. After all, even under the sway 
of custom, casual outbreaks are liable to 
occur. Some one’s passions will prove too 
much for him, and there will be an accident. 
What happens then in the primitive society ? 
Let us first consider one of the very un- 
organized communities at the bottom of the 
evolutionary scale; as, for example, the little 
Negritos of the Andaman Islands. Their 
justice, explains Mr. Man, in his excellent 
account of these people, is administered by 
the simple method of allowing the aggrieved 
party to take the law into his own hands. 
This he usually does by flinging a burning 
faggot at the offender, or by discharging an 
arrow at him, though more frequently near 
him. Meanwhile all others who may be 
present are apt to beat a speedy retreat, 
carrying off as much of their property as their 
haste will allow, and remaining hid in the 
jungle until sufficient time has elapsed for 
the quarrel to have blown over. Sometimes, 
however, friends interpose, and seek to deprive 
the disputants of their weapons. Should, how- 
ever, one of them kill the other, nothing is 
necessarily said or done to him by the rest. 
Yet conscience makes cowards of us all; so 
that the murderer, from prudential motives, 
will not uncommonly absent himself until he 


LAW 189 


judges that the indignation of the victim’s 
friends has sufficiently abated. 

Now here we seem to find want of social 
structure and want of law going together as 
cause and effect. The “friends” of whom 
we hear need to be organized into a police 
force. If we now turn to totemic society, with 
its elaborate clan-system, it is quite another 
story. Blood-revenge ranks amongst the fore- 
most of the clansman’s social obligations. 
Over the whole world it stands out by itself 
as the type of all that law means for the 
savage. Within the clan, indeed, the maxim 
of blood for blood does not hold; though there 
may be another kind of punitive law put into 
force by the totemites against an erring 
brother, as, for instance, if they slay one of 
their number for disregarding the exogamic 
rule and consorting with a woman who is 
all-one-flesh with him. But, between clans of 
the same tribe, the system of blood-revenge 
requires strict reprisals, according to the 
principle that some one on the other side, 
though not necessarily the actual murderer, 
must die the death. This is known as the 
principle of collective responsibility; and one 
of the most interesting problems relating 
to the evolution of early law is to work 
out how individual responsibility gradually 
develops out of collective, until at length, 


190 ANTHROPOLOGY 


even as each man does, so likewise he 
suffers. 

The collective method of settling one’s 
grievances is natural enough, when men are 
united into groups bound together by the 
closest of sentimental ties, and on the other 
hand there is no central and impartial 
authority to arbitrate between the parties. 
One of our crew has been killed by one of your 
crew. So a stand-up fight takes place. Of 
course we should like to get at the right man 
if we could; but, failing that, we are out to 
kill some one in return, just to teach your crew 
a lesson. Comparatively early in the day, 
however, it strikes the savage mind that there 
are degrees of responsibility. For instance, 
some one has to call the avenging party to- 
gether, and to lead it. He will tend to be a 
real blood-relation, son, father, or brother. 
Thus he stands out as champion, whilst the 
rest are in the position of mere seconds. 
Correspondingly, the other side will tend to 
thrust forward the actual offender into the 
office of counter-champion. There is direct 
evidence to show that, amongst Australians, 
Eskimo, and so on, whole groups at one time 
met in battle, but later on were represented 
by chosen individuals, in the persons of those 
who were principals in the affair. Thus we 
arrive at the duel. The transition is seen in 


LAW 191 


such a custom as that of the Port Lincoln 
black-fellows. The brother of the murdered 
man must engage the murderer; but any one 
on either side who might care to join in the 
_ fray was at liberty to do so. Hence it is but 
a step to the formal duel, as found, for instance, 
amongst the Apaches of North America. 

Now the legal duel is an advance on the 
collective bear-fight, if only because it brings 
home to the individual perpetrator of the 
crime that he will have to answer for it. 
Cranz, the great authority on the Eskimo of 
Greenland, naively remarks that a Green- 
lander dare not murder or otherwise wrong 
another, since it might possibly cost him the 
life of his best friend. Did the Greenlander 
know that it would probably cost him his own 
life, his sense of responsibility, we may sur- 
mise, might actually be quickened. On the 
other hand, duelling is not a satisfactory way 
of redressing the balance, since it merely gives 
the powerful bully an opportunity of adding a 
second murder to the first. Hence the ordeal 
marks an advance in legal evolution. A good 
many Australian peoples, for example, have 
reached the stage of requiring the murderer 
to submit to a shower of spears or boomerangs 
at the hands of the aggrieved group, on the 
mutual understanding that the blood-revenge 
ends here. 


192 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Luckily, however, for the murderer, it often 
takes time to bring him to book; and angry 
passions are apt in the meanwhile to subside. 
The ruder savages are not so bloodthirsty as 
we are apt to imagine. War has evolved like 
everything else; and with it has evolved the 
man who likes fighting for its own sake. So, 
in place of a life for a life, compensation 
—‘‘ pacation,”’ as it is technically termed— 
comes to be recognized as a reasonable quid 
pro quo. Constantly we find custom at the 
half-way stage. If the murderer is caught 
soon, he is killed; but if he can stave off the 
day of justice, he escapes with a fine. When 
private property has developed, the system of 
blood-fines becomes most elaborate. Amongst 
the Iroquois the manslayer must redeem him- 
self from death by means of no less than sixty 
presents to the injured kin; one to draw the 
axe out of the wound, a second to wipe 
the blood away, a third to restore peace to 
the land, and soforth. According to the collec- 
tive principle, the clansmen on one side share 
the price of atonement, and on the other side 
must tax themselves in order to make it up. 
Shares are on a scale proportionate to degrees 
of relationship. Or, again, further nice calcu- 
lations are required, if it is sought to adjust 
the gross amount of the payment to the degree 
of guilt. Hence it is not surprising that, when 


LAW 193 


a more or less barbarous people, such as the 
Anglo-Saxons, came to require a written law, 
it should be almost entirely taken up by 

regulations about blood-fines, that had become 
too complicated for the people any longer to 
keep in their heads. 

So far we have been considering the law of 
blood-revenge as purely an affair between the 
clans concerned; the rest of the tribal public 
keeping aloof, very much in the style of the 
Andamanese bystanders who retire into the 
jungle when there is a prospect of a row. 
But with the development of a central 
authority, whether in the shape of the rule of 
many or of one, the public control of the blood- 
feud begins to assert itself; for the good reason 
that endless vendetta is a dissolving force, 
which the larger and more stable type of 
society cannot afford to tolerate if it is to 
survive. The following are a few instances 
illustrative of the transition from private to 
public jurisdiction. In North America, Africa, 
and elsewhere, we find the chief or chiefs 
pronouncing sentence, but the clan or family 
left to carry it out as best they can. Again, 
the kin may be entrusted with the function of 
punishment, but obliged to carry it out in the 
way prescribed by the authorities; as, for 
instance, in Abyssinia, where the nearest 


relation executes the manslayer in the presence 
N 


194 ANTHROPOLOGY > 


of the king, using exactly the same kind of 
weapon as that with which the murder was 
committed. Or the right of the kin to 
punish dwindles to a mere form. Thus in 
Afghanistan the elders make a show of hand- 
ing over the criminal to his accusers, who must, 
however, comply strictly with the wishes of 
the assembly; whilst in Samoa the offender 
was bound and deposited before the family 
** as if to signify that he lay at their mercy,” 
and the chief saw to the rest. Finally, the 
state, in the person of its executive officers, 
both convicts and executes. 

When the state is represented by a single 
ruler, crime tends to become an offence 
against “‘the king’s peace ’’—or, in the 
language of Roman law, against his 
‘““majesty.”? Henceforward, the easy-going 
system of getting off with a fine is at an end, 
and murder is punished with the utmost 
sternness. In such a state as Dahomey, in 
the old days of its independence, there may 
have been a good deal of barbarity displayed 
in the administration of justice, but at any 
rate human life was no less effectively pro- 
tected by the law than it was, say, in medizval — 
Kurope. 


The evolution of the punishment of murder 
affords the typical instance of the develop- 


LAW 195 


ment of a legal sanction in primitive society. 
Other forms, however, of the forcible repres- 
sion of wrong-doing deserve a more or less 
passing notice. 

Adultery is, even amongst the ruder peoples, 
a transgression that is reckoned only a degree 
less grave than manslaughter; especially as 
manslaughter is a usual consequence of it, 
quarrels about women constituting one of the 
chief sources of trouble in the savage world. 
With a single interesting exception, the stages 
in the development of the law against adultery 
are exactly the same as in the case already 
examined. Whole kins fight about it. Then 
duelling is substituted. Then duelling gives 
way to the ordeal. Then, after the penalty 
has long wavered between death and a fine, 
fines become the rule, so long as the kins are 
allowed to settle the matter. If, however, the 
community comes to take cognizance of the 
offence, severer measures ensue. The one . 
noticeable difference in the two developments 
is the following. Whereas murder is an 
offence against the chief’s “ majesty,’ and as 
such a criminal offence, adultery, like theft, 
with which primitive law is wont to associate 
it as an. offence against property, tends to 
remain a purely civil affair. Kafir law, for 
example, according to Maclean, draws this 
distinction. very clearly. 


196 ANTHROPOLOGY 


It remains to add as regards adultery that, 
so far, we have only been considering the 
punishment that falls on the guilty man. 
The guilty woman’s fate is a matter relating 
to a distinct department of primitive law. 
Family jurisdiction, as we find it, for instance, 
in an advanced community such as ancient 
Rome, meant the right of the pater familias, 
the head of the house, to subject his familia, 
or household, which included his wife, his 
children (up to a certain age), and his slaves, 
to such domestic discipline as he saw fit. 
Such family jurisdiction was more or less 
completely independent of state jurisdiction ; 
and, indeed, has remained so in Kurope until 
comparatively recent times. 

What light, then, does the study of primitive 
society throw on the first beginnings of family 
law as administered by the house-father ? To 
answer this question at all adequately would 
involve the writing of many pages on the 
evolution of the family. For our present 
purpose, all turns on the distinction between 
the matripotestal and the patripotestal family. 
If the man and the woman were left to fight 
it out alone, the latter, despite the “‘ shrewish 
sanction ”’ that she possesses in her tongue, 
must inevitably bow to the principle that 
might is right. But, as long as marriage is 
matrilocal—that is to say, allows the wife to 


LAW 197 


remain at home amongst male defenders of 
her own clan—she can safely lord it over her 
stranger husband; and there can scarcely be 
adultery on her part, since she can always 
obtain divorce by simply saying, Go! Things 
grow more complicated when the wife lives 
amongst her husband’s people, and, neverthe- 
less, the system of counting descent favours 
her side of the family and not his. Does the 
mere fact that descent is matrilineal tend to 
imply on the whole that the mother’s kin take 
@ more active interest in her, and are more 
effective in protecting her from hurt, whether 
undeserved or deserved’? It is no easy 
problem to settle. Dr. Steinmetz, however, 
in his important work on The Evolution of 
Punishment (in German), seeks to show that 
under mother-right, in all its forms taken 
together, the adulteress is more likely to 
escape with a light penalty, or with none at all, 
than under father-right. Whatever be the 
value of the statistical method that he em- 
ploys, at any rate it makes out the death 
penalty to be inflicted in only a third of his 
cases under the former system, but in about 
half under the latter. 


We must be content with a mere glance at 
other types of wrong-doing which, whilst 
sooner or later recognized by the law of the 


198 ANTHROPOLOGY 


community, affect its members in their 
individual capacity. Theft and slander are 
cases in point. 

Amongst the ruder savages there cannot be 
much stealing, because there is next to nothing 
to steal. Nevertheless, groups are apt to 
quarrel over hunting and fishing claims; 
whilst the division of the spoils of the chase | 
may give rise to disputes, which call for the 
interposition of leading men. We even occa- 
sionally find amongst Australians the formal 
duel employed to decide cases of the violation 
of property-rights. Not, however, until the 
arts of life have advanced, and wealth has 
created the two classes of “ haves”’ and “ have- 
nots,’’ does theft become an offence of the 
first magnitude, which the central authority 
punishes with corresponding severity. 

As regards slander, though it might seem a 
slight matter, it must be remembered that the 
savage cannot stand up for a moment against 
an adverse public opinion; so that to rob 
him of his good name is to take away all that 
makes life worth living. To shout out, Long- 
nose ! Sunken-eyes! or Skin-and-bone! usu- 
ally leads to a fight in Andamanese circles, 
as Mr. Man informs us. Nor, again, is it | 
conducive to peace in Australian society to 
sing as follows about the staying-powers of 
a fellow-tribesman temporarily overtaken by 


LAW. 199 


Kuropean liquor: “Spirit like emu—as a 
whirlwind—pursues—lays violent hold on 
travelling—uncle of mine (this being par- 
ticularly derisive)—tired out with fatigue— | 
throws himself down helpless.” Amongst 
more advanced peoples, therefore, slander 
and abuse are sternly checked. They con- 
stitute a ground for a civil action in Kafir law; 
whilst we even hear of an African tribe, the 
Ba-Ngindo, who rejoice in the special institu- 
tion of a peace- -maker, whose business is to 
yaa troubles arising from fib vexatious 
source 


Let us now turn to another class of offences, 
such as, from the first, are regarded as so 
prejudicial to the public interest that the 
community as a whole must forcibly put them 
down. 

Cases of what may be termed military 
discipline fall under this head. Even when 
the functions of the commander are unde- 
veloped, and war is still “ an affair of armed 
mobs,”’ shirking—a form of crime which, to 
do justice to primitive society, is rare—is 
promptly and effectively resented by the host. 
Amongst American tribes the coward’s arms 
are taken away from him; he is made to eat 
with the dogs; or perhaps a shower of arrows 
causes him to “run the gauntlet.” The 


200 ANTHROPOLOGY 


traitor, on the other hand, is inevitably slain 
without mercy—tied to a tree and shot, or, it 
may be, literally hacked to pieces. Naturally, 
with the evolution of war, these spontaneous 
outbursts of wrath and disgust give way to a 
more formal system of penalties. To trace 
out this development fully, however, would 
entail a lengthy disquisition on the growth of 
kingship in one of its most important aspects. 
If constant fighting turns the tribe into some- 
thing like a standing army, the position of 
war-lord, as, for instance, amongst the Zulus, 
is bound to become both permanent and of 
all-embracing authority. There is, however, 
another side to the history of kingship, as the 
following considerations will help to make 
clear. 

Public safety is construed by the ruder 
type of man not so much in terms of freedom 
from physical danger—unless such a danger, 
the onset of another tribe, for instance, is 
actually imminent—as in terms of freedom 
from spiritual, or mystic, danger. The fear of 
ill-luck, in other words, is the bogy that 
haunts him night and day. Hence his life 
is enmeshed, as Dr. Frazer puts it, in a net- 
work of taboos. A taboo is anything that 
one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill- 
luck is catching, like an infectious disease. 
If my next-door neighbour breaks a taboo, 


LAW 201 


and brings down a visitation on himself, 
depend upon it some of its unpleasant conse- 
quences will be passed on to me and mine. 
- Hence, if some one has committed an act that 
is not merely acrime but a sin, it is every one’s 
concern to wipe out that sin; which is usually 
done by wiping out the sinner. Mobbish 
feeling always inclines to violence. In the 
mob, as a French psychologist has said, ideas 
neutralize each other, but emotions aggrandize 
each other. Now war-feeling is a mobbish 
experience that, I daresay, some of my readers 
have tasted; and we have seen how it leads 
the unorganized levy of a savage tribe to make 
short work of the coward and traitor. But 
war-fever is a mild variety of mobbish ex- 
perience as compared with panic in any form, 
and with superstitious panic most of all. 
Being attacked in the dark, as it were, causes 
the strongest to lose their heads. 

Hence it is not hard to understand how it 
comes about that the violator of a taboo is 
the central object of communal vengeance in 
primitive society. The most striking instance 
of such a taboo-breaker is the man or woman 
who disregards the prohibition against marri- 
age within the kin—in other words, violates 
the law of exogamy. To be thus guilty of 
incest is to incite in the community at large 
-a horror which, venting itself in what Bagehot 


202 ANTHROPOLOGY 


calls a “‘ wild spasm of wild justice,” involves 
certain death for the offender. To interfere 
with a grave, to pry into forbidden mysteries, 
to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are further 
examples of transgressions liable to be thus 
punished. 

Falling under the same general category of 
sin, though distinct from the violation of 
taboo, is witchcraft. This consists in traffick- — 
ing, or at any rate in being supposed to 
traffic, with powers of evil for sinister and 
anti-social ends. We have only to remember 
how England, in the seventeenth century, 
could work itself up into a frenzy on this 
account to realize how, in an African society 
even of the better sort, the “ smelling-out ” 
and destroying of a witch may easily become 
a general panacea for quieting the public 
nerves. | 

When crimes and sins, affairs of state and 
affairs of church thus overlap and commingle 
in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder if 
the functions of those who administer the law 
should tend to display a similar fusion of 
aspects. The chief, or king, has a “ divine 
right,’’ and is himself in one or another sense 
divine, even whilst he takes the lead in regard 
to all such matters as are primarily secular. 
The earliest written codes, such as the Mosaie 
Books of the Law, with their strange medley 


LAW 203 


of injunctions concerning things profane and 
sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious 
character of all primitive authority. 

Indeed, it is only by an effort of abstraction 
that the present chapter has been confined 
to the subject of law, as distinguished from 
the subject of the following chapter, namely, 
religion. Any crime, as notably murder, and 
even under certain circumstances theft, is 
apt to be viewed by the ruder peoples either 
as a violation of taboo, or as some closely 
related form of sin. Nay, within the limits of 
the clan, legal punishment can scarcely be said 
to be in theory possible; the sacredness of the 
blood-tie lending to any chastisement that 
may be inflicted on an erring kinsman the 
purely religious complexion of a sacrifice, an 
act of excommunication, a penance, or what 
not. ‘Thus almost insensibly we are led on to 
the subject of religion from the study of the 
legal sanction; this very term “ sanction,” 
which is derived from Roman law, pointing in > 
the same direction, since it originally stood 
for the curse which was appended in order to 
secure the inviolability of a legal enactment. 


204 ANTHROPOLOGY 


CHAPTER VIII 
RELIGION 


** How can there be a History of Religions? ” 
once objected a French senator. “ For either 
one believes in a religion, and then everything 
in it appears natural; or one does not believe 
in it, and then everything in it appears 
absurd ! ”’ 

This was said some thirty years ago, when 
it was a question of founding the now famous 
chair of the General History of Religions at 
the Collége de France. At that time, such 
chairs were almost unheard of. Now-a-days, 
the more important universities of the world, 
to reckon them alone, can show at least 
thirty. 

What is the significance of this change? lt 
means that the parochial view of religion is 
out of date. The religious man has to be a 
man of the world, a man of the wider world, 
an anthropologist. He has to recognize that 
there is a “soul of truth ”’ in other religions 
besides his own. 

It will be replied—and I fully realize the 
force of the objection—that history, and 
therefore anthropology, has nothing to do 
with truth or falsehood—in a word, with value. 


RELIGION 205 


_ In strict theory, this is so. Its business is to 
describe and generalize fact; and religion from 

first to last might be pure illusion or even 

- delusion, and it would be fact none the less on 
that account. 7 | 

At the same time, being men, we all find it 
hard, nay impossible, to study mankind im- 
partially. When we say that we are going to 
play the historian, or the anthropologist, and 
to put aside for the time being all considera- 
tion of the moral of the story we seek to unfold, 
we are merely undertaking to be as fair all 
round as we can. Willy nilly, however, we 
are sure to colour our history, to the extent, 
at any rate, of taking a hopeful or a gloomy 
view of man’s past achievements, as bearing 
on his present condition and his future 
prospects. 

In the same way, then, I do not believe 
that we can help thinking to ourselves all the 
time, when we are tracing out the history of 
world-religion, either that there is “‘ nothing 
in it”? at all, or that there is “ something in 
it,’’ whatever form it assume, and whether it 
hold itself to be revealed (as it almost always 
does) or not. On the latter estimate of 
religion, however, it is still quite possible to 
judge that one form of religion is infinitely 
higher and better than another. Religion, 

regarded historically, is in evolution. The 


206 ANTHROPOLOGY 


best form of religion to which we can attain is 
inevitably the best for us; but, as a worse 
form preceded it, so a better form, we must 
allow and even desire, may follow. Now, 
frankly, I am one of those who take the more 
sympathetic view of historical religion; and 
I say so at once, in case my interpretation of 
the facts turn out to be coloured by this 
sanguine assumption. 

Moreover, I think that we may easily 
exaggerate the differences in culture and, 
more especially, in religious insight and under- 
standing that exist between the ruder peoples 
and ourselves. In view of our common hope, 
and our common want of knowledge, I would 
rather identify religion with a general striving 
of humanity than with the exclusive pre- 
tension of any one people or sect. Who 
knows, for instance, the final truth about 
what happens to the soul at death? I am 
quite ready to admit, indeed, that some of 
us can see a little farther into a brick wall 
than, say, Neanderthal man. Yet when I 
find facts that appear to prove that Neander- 
thal man buried his dead with ceremony, 
and to the best of his means equipped them 
for a future life, I openly confess that I would | 
rather stretch out a hand across the ages and 
greet him as my brother and fellow-pilgrim 
than throw in my lot with the self-righteous 


RELIGION 207 


folk who seem to imagine this world and the 
next to have been created for their exclusive 
benefit. 

_. Now the trouble with anthropologists is to 
find a working definition of religion on which 
they can agree. Christianity is religion, all 
would have to admit. Again, Mahomedanism 
is religion, for all anthropological purposes. 
But, when a naked savage “ dances ” his god 
—when the spoken part of the rite simply con- 
sists, as amongst the south-eastern Austra- 
lians, in shouting ‘‘ Daramulun! Daramulun!?’’ 
(the god’s name), so that we cannot be sure 
whether the dancers are indulging in a prayer 
or in an incantation—is that religion ? Or, 
worse still, suppose that no sort of personal 
god can be discovered at the back of the 
performance—which consists, let us say, as 
amongst the central Australians, in solemnly 
rubbing a bull-roarer on the stomach, so that 
its mystic virtues may cause the man to 
become “good” and “ glad ”’ and “strong” 
(for that is his own way of describing the 
spiritual effects)—is that religion, in any 
sense that can link it historically with, say, 
the Christian type of religion ? 

No, say some, these low-class dealings with 
the unseen are magic, not religion. The rude 
folk in question do not go the right way about 
putting themselves into touch with the unseen. 


208 ANTHROPOLOGY 


They try to put pressure on the unseen, to 
control it. They ought to conciliate it, by 
bowing to its will. Their methods may be 
earnest, but they are not propitiatory. There 
is too much “My will be done” about it 
all. 

Unfortunately, two can play at this game of 
ex-parte definition. The more unsympathetic 
type of historian, relentlessly pursuing the 
clue afforded by this distinction between 
control and conciliation, professes himself 
able to discover plenty of magic even in the 
higher forms of religion. The rite as such 
—say, churchgoing as such—appears to be 
reckoned by some of the devout as not without 
a certain intrinsic efficacy. “‘ Very well,” says 
this school, “then a good deal of average 
Christianity is magic.” 

My own view, then, is that this distinction 
will only lead us into trouble. And, to my 
mind, it adds to the confusion if it be further 
laid down, as some would do, that this sort 
of dealing with the unseen which, on the face 
of it, and according to our notions, seems 
rather mechanical (being, as it were, an effort 
to get a hold on some hidden force) is so far _ 
from being akin to religion that its true 
affinity is with natural science. The natural 
science of to-day, I quite admit, has in part 
evolved out of experiments with the occult; 


RELIGION 209 


just as law, fine art, and almost every other 
one of.our higher interests have likewise done. 
But just so long and so far as it was occult 
science, 1 would maintain, it was not natural 
science at all, but, as it were, rather super- 
natural science. Besides, much of our natura! 
science has grown up out of straightforward 
attempts to carry out mechanical work on 
industrial lines—to smelt iron, let us say; 
but since then, as now, there were numerous 
trade-secrets, an atmosphere of mystery was 
apt to surround the undertaking, which helped 
to give it the air of a trafficking with the 
uncanny. But because science then, as even 
now sometimes, was thought by the ignorant 
to be somehow closely associated with all the 
powers of evil, it does not follow that then or 
now the true affinity of science must be with 
the devil. 

Magic and religion, according to the view I 
-would support, belong to the same department 
of human experience—one of the two great 
departments, the two worlds, one might almost 
call them, into which human experience, 
throughout its whole history, has been divided. 
Together they belong to the supernormal 
world, the 2-region of experience, the region 
of mental twilight. 

Magic I take to include all bad ways, and 
religion all good ways, of dealing with the 

fe) 


210 | ANTHROPOLOGY 


supernormal—bad and good, of course, not as 
we may happen to judge them, but as the 
society concerned judges them. Sometimes, 
indeed, the people themselves hardly know 
where to draw the line between the two; and, 
in that case, the anthropologist cannot well 
do it for them. But every primitive society 
thinks witchcraft bad. Witchcraft consists 
in leaguing oneself with supernormal powers 
of evil in order to effect selfish and anti-social 
ends. Witchcraft, then, is genuine magic— 
black magic, of the devil’s colour. On: the 
other hand, every primitive society also 
distinguishes certain salutary ways of dealing 
with supernormal powers. All these ways 
taken together constitute religion. For the 
rest, there will always be a mass of more or 
less evaporated beliefs, going with practices 
that have more or less lost their hold on 
the community. These belong to the folk- 
lore which every people has. Under this or 
some closely related head must also be set 
down the mass of mere wonder-tales, due 
to the play of fancy, and without direct 
bearing on the serious pursuits of life. 

The world to which neither magic nor — 
religion belongs, but to which physical science, 
the knowledge of how to deal mechanically 
with material things, does belong wholly, is 
the workaday world, the region of normal, 


“RELIGION 211 


commonplace, calculable happenings. With 
our telescopes and microscopes we see farther 
and deeper into things than does the savage. 
Yet the savage has excellent eyes. What he 
sees he sees. Consequently, we must duly 
allow for the fact that there is for him, as 
well as for us, a “natural,” that is to say, 
normal and workaday world; even though 
it be far narrower in extent than ours. The 
savage is not. perpetually spook-haunted. On 
the contrary, when he is engaged on the daily 
round, and all is going well, he is as careless 
and happy as a child. 

But ‘savage life has few safeguards. Crisis 
is a frequent, if intermittent, element in it. 
Hunger, sickness and war are examples of 
crisis. Birth and death are crises. Marriage 
is usually regarded by humanity as a crisis. 
So is initiation—the turning-point in one’s 
career, when one steps out into the world of 
men. Now what, in terms of mind, does 
crisis mean ? It means that one is at one’s 
wits’ end; that the ordinary and expected 
has been replaced by the extraordinary and 
unexpected; that we are projected into the 
world of the unknown. And in that world 
of the unknown we must miserably abide 
until, somehow, confidence is restored. 

Psychologically regarded, then, the function 
of religion is to restore men’s confidence when 


212 ANTHROPOLOGY 


it is shaken by crisis. Men do not seek crisis; 
they would always run away from it, if they 
could. Crisis seeks them; and, whereas the 
feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder 
spirits face it. Religion is the facing of the 
unknown. It is the courage in it that brings 
comfort.? 

We must go on, however, to consider religion 
sociologically. <A religion is the effort to face 
crisis, so far as that effort is organized by 
society in some particular way. A religion is 
congregational—that is to say, serves the ends 
of a number of persons simultaneously. It is 
traditional—that is to say, has served the ends 
of successive generations of persons. There- 
fore inevitably it has standardized a method. 
It involves a routine, aritual. Also it involves 
some sort of conventional doctrine, which is, 
as it were, the inner side of the ritual—its 
lining. 

Now in what follows I shall insist, in the first 
instance, on this sociological side of religion. 
For anthropological purposes it is the sounder 
plan. We must altogether eschew that 
‘** Robinson Crusoe method ” which consists in 
reconstructing the creed of a solitary savage, — 


1 The courage involved in all live religion normally 
coexists with a certain modesty or humility. I have tried 
to work out this point elsewhere in a short study entitled 
The Birth of Humility (in The Threshold of Religion, 1914). 


RELIGION 213 


who is supposed to evolve his religion out of his 
inner consciousness: ** The mountain frowns, 
therefore it is alive”; “ I move about in my 
dreams whilst my body lies still, therefore I 
have a soul,” and so on. No doubt some- 
body had to think these things, for they are 
thoughts. But he did not think them, at 
any rate did not think them out, alone. Men 
thought them out together; nay, whole ages 
of living and thinking together have gone to 
make them what they are. Soa social method 
is needed to explain them. 

The religion of a savage is part of his custom; 
nay, rather, it is his whole custom so far as it 
appears sacred—so far as it coerces him by 
way of his imagination. Between him and 
the unknown stands nothing but his custom. 
It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faith and 
his hope. Being thus the sole source of his 
confidence, his custom, so far as his imagination 
plays about it, becomes his “‘ luck.”” We may 
say that any and every custom, in so far as it 
is regarded as lucky, is a religious rite. 

Hence the conservatism inherent in religion. 
‘** Nothing,” says Robertson Smith, “‘ appeals 
so strongly as religion to the conservative 
instincts.” ‘‘ The history of religion,’? once 
exclaimed Dr. Frazer, “is a long attempt to 
reconcile old custom with new reason, to find 
a sound theory for absurd practice.” At first 


214 ANTHROPOLOGY 


sight one is apt to see nothing but the 
absurdities in savage custom and religion. 
After all, these are what strike us most, 
being the curiosity-hunters that we all are. 
But savage custom and religion must be 
taken as a whole, the bad side with the 
good. Of course, if we have to do with 
a primitive society on the down-grade—and 
very few that have been “ civilizaded,” as 
John Stuart Mill terms it, at the hands of 
the white man are not on the down-grade 
—its disorganized and debased custom no 
longer serves a vital function. But a healthy 
society is bound, in a wholesale way, to 
have a healthy custom. Though it may go 
about the business in a queer and roundabout 
fashion, it must hit off the general require- 
ments of the situation. Therefore I shall not 
waste time, as 1 might easily do, in piling 
up instances of outlandish “ superstitions,”’ 
whether horrible and disgusting, from our 
more advanced point of view, or merely droll 
and silly. On the contrary, I would rather 
make it my working assumption that, with 
all its apparent drawbacks, the religion of a 
human society, if the latter be a going coneern, 
is always something to be respected.. 

In considering, however, the relation of 
religion to custom, we are met by the apparent 
difficulty that, whereas custom implies ‘* Do,” 


RELIGION 215 


the prevailing note of primitive religion would 
seem rather to consist in “‘ Do not.” But 
there is really no antagonism between them 
on this account. As the old Greek proverb 
has it, “ There is only one way of going right, 
but there are infinite ways of going wrong.” 
Hence, a nice observance of custom of itself 
involves endless taboos. Since a given line of 
conduct is lucky, then this or that alternative 
course of behaviour must be unlucky. There 
is just this difference between positive customs 
or rites, which cause something to be done, and 
negative customs or rites, which cause some- 
thing to be left undone, that the latter appeal 
more exclusively to the imagination for their 
sanction, and are therefore more conspicuously 
and directly a part of religion. ‘‘ Why should 
I do this ? ’”’ is answered well-nigh sufficiently 
by saying, “‘ Because it is the custom, because 
itis right.” It seems hardly necessary to add, 
** Because it will bring luck.” But “‘ Why 
should I not do something else instead ?” 
meets, in the primitive society, with the 
invariable answer, ‘* Because, if you do, some- 
thing awful will happen to us all.’?’ What 
precise shape the ill-luck will take need not 
be specified. The suggestion rather gains than 
loses by the indefiniteness of its appeal to the 
imagination. 


216 ANTHROPOLOGY 


To understand more clearly the difference 
between negative and positive types of custom 
as associated with religion, let us examine in 
some detail an example of each. It will be 
well to select our cases from amongst those that 
show the custom and the religion to be quite 
inseparable—to be, in short, but two aspects 
of one and the same fact. Now nothing could 
be more commonplace and secular a custom 
than that of providing for one’s dinner. Yet 
for primitive society this custom tends to be 
likewise a rite—a rite which may, however, 
be mainly negative and precautionary, or 
mainly positive and practical in character, as 
we shall now see. 

The Todas, so well described by Dr. Rivers: 
are a small community, less than a thousand 
all told, who have retired out of the stress of 
the world into the fastnesses of the Nilgiri. 
Hills, in southern India, where they spend a 
safe but decidedly listless life. They are in a 
backwater, and are likely to remain there. At 
any rate, their religion is not such as to make 
them more enterprising. Gods they may be 
said to have none. The bare names of certain 
deities of the hill-tops are retained, but whether 
these were once the honoured gods of the 
Todas or, as some think, those of a former 
race, certain it is that there is more shadow 
than substance about them now. The real 


RELIGION 217 


religion of the people centres round a dairy- 
ritual. From a practical and economic point 
of view, the work of the dairy consists in con- 
_verting the milk of their buffaloes into the 
butter and buttermilk which constitute their 
staple diet. From a religious point of view, 
it consists in converting something they dare 
not eat into something they can eat. 

Many, though not all, of their buffaloes are 
sacred, and their milk may not be drunk. 
The reason why it may not be drunk anthropo- 
logists may cast about to discover, but the 
‘Todas themselves do not know. All that they 
know, and are concerned to know, is that 
things would somehow all go wrong, if any one 
were foolish enough to commit such a sin. 
So in the Toda temple, which is a dairy, the 
Toda priest, who is the dairyman, sets about 
rendering the sacred products harmless. The 
dairy has two compartments—one sacred, the 
other profane. In the first are stored the 
sacred vessels, into which the milk is placed 
when it comes from the buffaloes, and in which 
it is turned into butter and buttermilk with 
the help of some of the previous brew, this 
having meanwhile been put by in an especially 
sacred vessel. Inthe second compartment are 
profane vessels, destined to receive the butter 
and buttermilk, after they have been carefully 
transferred from the sacred vessels with the 


218 ANTHROPOLOGY 


help of an intermediary vessel, which stands 
exactly on the line between the two compart- 
ments. This transference, being carried out 
to the accompaniment of all sorts of reverential 
gestures and utterances, secures such a pro- 
fanation of the sacred substance as is without 
the evil consequences that would otherwise 
be entailed. Thus the ritual is essentially 
precautionary. A taboo is the hinge of the 
whole affair. 

And the tendency of such a negative type 
of religion is to pile precautions on precautions. 
Thus the dairyman, in order to be equal to his 
sacred office, must observe taboos without 
end. He must be celibate. He must avoid 
all contact with the dead. He is limited to 
certain kinds of food; which, moreover, must 
be prepared in a certain way, and consumed 
in a certain place. His drink, again, is a 
special milk, which must be poured out with 
prescribed formulas. He is inaccessible to 
ordinary folk save on certain days and in 
certain ways, their mode of approach, their 
salutations, his greeting in reply, being all 
regulated with the utmost nicety. He can 
only wear a special garb. He must never cut 
his hair. His nails must be suffered to: grow 
long. And so on and so forth. Such. dis- 
abilities, indeed, are wont to circumscribe the 
life of all sacred persons, and can be matched 


RELIGION |. 219 


from every part of the world. But they may 
fairly be cited here, as helping to fill in the 
picture of what I have called the precautionary 
or negative type of religious ritual. 

Further, there is something rotten in the 
state of Toda religion. The dairymen struck 
Dr. Rivers as very slovenly in the perform- 
ance of their duties, as well as vague and 
imaccurate in their accounts of what ought to 
be done. Indeed, it was hard to find persons 
willing to undertake the office. Ritual duties 
involving uncomfortable taboos were apt to 
be thrust on youngsters. The youngsters, 
being youngsters, would probably violate the 
taboos; but anyway that was their look-out: 
From evasions to fictions is but astep. Hence 
when an unclean person approached the dairy- 
man, the latter would simply pretend not to 
see him. Or the rule that he must not enter a 
hut, if women were within, would be circum- 
vented by simply removing from the dwelling 
the three emblemsof womanhood, the pounder, 
the sieve, and the sweeper; whereupon his 
‘“* face was saved.’? Now wherefore all this 
lack of earnestness ? Dr. Rivers thinks that 
too much ritual was the reason. Iagree; but 
would venture to add, “too much negative 
ritual.”’ A religion that is all dodging must 
produce a'sneaking kind of worshipper. 

Now let us turn to another type of primitive 


220 ANTHROPOLOGY 


religion that is equally identified with the food- 
quest, but allied to its positive and active 
functions, which it seeks to help out. Messrs. 
Spencer and Gillen have given us a most 
minute account of certain ceremonies of the 
Arunta, a people of central Australia. These 
ceremonies they have named Intichiuma, and 
the name will probably stick, though there is 
reason to believe that the native word for them 
is really something different. Their purpose 
is to make the food-animals and food-plants 
multiply and prosper. Each animal or plant 
is attended to by the group that has it for a 
totem. (Totemism amongst this very remark- 
able people has nothing to do either with 
exogamy or with lineage; but that is a sub- 
ject into which it is impossible to go here.) 
The rites vary considerably from totem to 
totem, but a typical case or two may be 
cited. 

The witchetty-grub men, for instance, want 
the grubs to multiply, that there may be plenty 
for their fellows to eat. So they wend their 
way along a certain path which tradition 
declares to have been traversed by the 
great leader of the witchetty-grubs of the 
days of long ago. (These were grubs trans- 
formed into men, who became by reincarnation 
ancestors of the present totemites.) The path 
brings them to a place in the hills where there 


RELIGION 221 


is a big stone surrounded by many small 
stones. The big stone is the adult animal, 
the little stones are its eggs. So first they tap 
_ the big stone, chanting an invitation to it to 
lay eggs. Then the master of the ceremonies 
rubs the stomach of each totemite with the 
little stones, and says, “ You have eaten 
mueh food.” 

Or, again, the Kangaroo men repair to a 
place called Undiara. It is a picturesque 
spot. By the side of a water-hole that is 
sheltered by a tall gum-tree rises a curiously 
gnarled and weather-beaten face of quartzite 
rock. About twenty feet from the base a 
ledge juts out. When the totemites hold 
their ceremony, they repair to this ledge. 
For here in the days of long ago the ancestors 
who are now reincarnated in them cooked 
and ate kangaroo food; and here, moreover, 
the kangaroo animals of that time deposited 
their spirit-parts. First the face of the rock 
below the ledge is decorated with long stripes 
of red ochre and white gypsum, to represent 
the red fur and white bones of the kangaroo. 
It is, in fact, one of those rock-paintings such 
as the paleolithic men of Europe made in 
their caves. Then a number of men, say, 
seven or eight, mount upon the ledge, and, 
whilst the rest sing solemn chants about the 
prospective increase of the kangaroos, these 


222 ANTHROPOLOGY 


men open veins in their arms, so that the blood 
flows down freely upon the ceremonial stone. 
This is the first part of the rite. The second 
part is no less interesting. After the blood- 
letting, they hunt until they kill a kangaroo. 
Thereupon the old men of the totem eat a 
little of the meat; then they smear some of 
the fat on the bodies of all the party; finally, 
they divide the flesh amongst them. After- 
wards, the totemites paint their bodies with 
stripes in imitation of the design upon the rock. 
A second hunt, followed by a second sacra- 
mental meal, concludes the whole ceremony. 
That their meal is sacramental, a sort of 
communion service, is proved by the fact 
that henceforth in an ordinary way they 
allow themselves to partake of kangaroo meat 
at most but very sparingly, and of certain 
portions of the flesh not at all. 

One more example of these rites may be 
cited, in order to bring out the earnestness 
of this type of religion, which is concerned 
with doing, instead of mere not-doing. There 
is none of the Toda perfunctoriness here. It 
will be enough to glance at the commence- 
ment of the ritual of the honey-ant totemites. 
The master of the ceremonies places his hand 
as if he were shading his eyes, and gazes 
intently in the direction of the sacred place 
to which they are about to repair. As he 


RELIGION 223 


does so, the rest kneel, forming a straight 
line behind him. In this position they remain 
for some time, whilst the leader chants in 
a subdued tone. Then all stand up. The 
company must now start. The leader, who 
has fallen to the rear, that he may marshal 
the column in perfect line, gives the signal. 
Then they move off in single file, taking a 
direct course to the holy ground, marching 
in perfect silence, and with measured step, 
as if something of the profoundest import 
were about to take place. 

I make no apology for describing these 
proceedings at some length. It is necessary 
to my argument to convey the impression that 
the essentials of religion are present in these 
apparently godless observances of the ruder 
peoples. They arise directly out of custom 
—in this case the hunting custom. Their 
immediate design is to provide these people 
with their daily bread. Yet their appeal to 
the imagination—which in religion, as in 
science, art, and philosophy, is the impulse 
that presides over all progress, all creative 
evolution—is such that the food-quest is 
charged with new and deeper meaning. Not 
bread alone, but. something even more: sus- 
taining to the life of man, is suggested by these 
tangled and obscure solemnities. They are 
penetrated by quickenings of sacrifice, prayer, 


224 ANTHROPOLOGY 


and communion. They bring to bear on the 
need of the hour all the promise of that 
miraculous past, which not only cradled the 
race, but still yields it the stock of reincarnated 
soul-force that enables it to survive. If, then, 
these rites are part and parcel of mere magic, 
most, or all, of what the world knows as 
religion must be mere magic. But it is better 
for anthropology to call things by the names 
that they are known by in the world of men— 
that is, in the wider world, not in some corner 
or coterie of it. 


In order to bring out more fully the second 
point that I have been trying to make, namely, 
the close interdependence between religion 
and custom in primitive society, let me be 
allowed to quote one more example of the 
ritual of a rude people. And again let us 
resort to native Australia, though this time 
to the south-eastern corner of it; since in 
Australia we have a cultural development on 
the whole very low, having been as it were 
arrested through isolation, yet one that turns 
out to be not incompatible with high religion 
in the making. 

Initiation in native Australia is the equiva- 
lent of what is known amongst ourselves as 
the higher education. The only difference is 
that, with them, every one who is not judged 


RELIGION | 225 


utterly unfit is duly initiated; whereas, with 
us, the higher education is offered to some who 
are unfit, whilst many who are fit never have 
the luck to get it. The initiation-custom is 
intended to tide the boys over the’ difficult 
time of puberty, and turn them into respon- 
sible men. The whole of the adult males assist 
in the ceremonies. Special men, however, are 
told off to tutor the youth—a lengthy business, 
since it entails a retirement, perhaps for six 
months, into the bush with their charges; who 
are there taught the tribal traditions, and are 
generally admonished, sometimes forcibly, 
for their good. Further, this is rather like a 
retirement into a monastery for the young 
men, seeing that during all the time they are 
strictly taboo, or in other words in a holy 
state that involves much fasting and mortifi- 
cation of the flesh. At last comes the time 
when their actual passage across the thresh- 
old of manhood has to be celebrated. The 
rites may be described in one word as im- 
pressive. Society wishes to set a stamp on 
their characters, and believes in stamping 
hard. Physically, then, the lads feel the force 
of society. A tooth is knocked out, they are 
tossed in the air to make them grow tall, and 
so on—rites that, whilst they may have 
separate occult ends in view, are completely 
at one in being highly unpleasant. 
P 


226 ANTHROPOLOGY 


Spiritual means of education, however, are 
always more effective than physical, if designed 
and applied with sufficient wisdom. The bull- 
roarer, of which something has been already 
said, furnishes the ceremonies with a back- 
ground of awe. It fills the woods, that sur- 
round the secret spot where the rites are held, 
with the rise and fall of its weird music, sug- 
gestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits 
in the air. Not until the boys graduate as 
men do they learn how the sound is produced. 
Even when they do learn this, the mystery of 
the voice speaking through the chip of wood 
merely wings the imagination for loftier 
flights. Whatever else the high god of these 
mysteries, Daramulun, may be for these 
people—and undoubtedly all sorts of trains 
of confused thinking meet in the notion of 
him—he is at any rate the god of the bull- 
roarer, who has put his voice into the sacred _ 
instrument. But Daramulun is _ likewise 
endowed with a human form; for they set 
up an image of him rudely shaped in wood, 
and round about it dance and shout his name. 
Daramulun instituted these rites, as well as 
all the other immemorial rites of the assembled | 
tribe or tribes. So when over the heads of 
the boys, prostrated on the ground, are 
recited solemnly what Mr. Lang calls “ the 
ten commandments,” that bid them honour 


RELIGION 227 


the elders, respect the marriage law, and so 
on, there looms up before their minds the 
figure of the ultimate law-giver; whilst his 
unearthly voice becomes for them the voice 
of the law. Thus is custom exalted, and its 
coercive force amplified, by the suggestion 
of a power—in this case a definitely personal 
power—that “‘ makes for righteousness,”’ and, 
whilst beneficent, is full of terror for offenders. 


And now it may seem high time to pass on 
from the sociological and external view that 
has hitherto been taken of primitive religion 
to a psychological view of it—one that should 
endeavour to disclose the hidden motives, 
the spiritual sources, of the beliefs that under- 
lie and sustain the customary practices. But 
precisely at this point the anthropological 
treatment of religion is apt to prove unsatis- 
factory. History can record that such and 
such is done with far more certainty than that 
such and such a state of mind accompanies and 
inspires the doing. Besides, the savage is no 
authority on the why and wherefore of his 
customs. ‘“ However else would a reasonable 
being think of acting ?”’ is his sufficient reason, 
as we have already seen. Not but what the 
higher minds amongst savages reflect in their 
own way upon the meaning of their customs 
and rites. But most of this reflection is no more 


228 ANTHROPOLOGY 


than an elaborate “ justification after the 
event.” The mind invents what Mr. Kipling 
would call a “‘ Just-so story ” to account for 
something already there. How it might have 
come about, not how it did come about, is all 
that the professed explanation amounts to. 
And when it comes to choosing amongst mere 
possibilities, the anthropologist, instead of 
consulting the savage, may just as well 
endeavour to do it for himself. 

Now anthropological theories of the origin 
of religion seem to me to go wrong mainly 
because they seek to simplify too much. 
Having got down to what they take to be a 
root-idea, they straightway proclaim it the 
root-idea. I believe that religion has just as 
few, or as many, roots as human life and 
mind. — 

The theory of the origin of religion that 
may be said to hold the field, because it is 
the view of the greatest of living anthropolo- 
gists, is Sir E. Tylor’s theory of animism. 
‘The term animism is derived from the Latin 
anima, which—like the corresponding word 
spiritus, whence our “ spirit ’’—signifies the 
breath, and hence the soul, which primitive 
folk tend to identify with the breath. Sir EK. 
Tylor’s theory of animism, then, as set forth 
in his great work, Primitive Culture, is that 
“the belief in spiritual beings ” will do as a 


RELIGION 229° 


definition of religion taken at its least; which 
for him means the same thing as taken at its 
earliest. Now what is a “ spiritual being ” ? 
Clearly everything turns on that. Sir E.Tylor’s 
general treatment of the subject seems to 
lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. 
A phantasm (as the etymology of the word 
shows) is essentially an appearance. In a. 
dream or hallucination one sees figures, more 

or less dim, but still having ‘‘ vaporous | 
materiality.”’ So, too, the shadow is something 
without body that one can see; though the 
breath, except on a frosty day, shows its subtle 
but yet sensible nature rather by being felt 
than by being seen. Now there can be no 
doubt that the phantasm plays a considerable 
part in primitive religion (as well as in those 
fancies of the primitive mind that have never 
found their way into religion, at all events 
into religion as identified with organized cult). 
Savages see ghosts, though probably not more 
frequently than we do; they have vivid 
dreams, and are much impressed by their 
dream-experiences; and so on. Besides, the 
phantasm forms a very convenient half-way 
house between the seen and the unseen; and 
there can be no doubt that the savage often 
says breath, shadow, and so forth, when he 
is trying .to think and mean something 
immaterial altogether. : 


230 ANTHROPOLOGY 


But animism would seem sometimes to be 
used by Sir E. Tylor in a wider sense, namely, as 
‘* a doctrine of universal vitality.”” In dealing 
with the myths of the ruder peoples, as, for 
example, those about the sun, moon, and stars, 
he shows how “a general animation of nature ” 
is implied. The primitive man reads himself 
into these things, which, according to our 
science, are without life or personality. He 
thinks that they have a different kind of body, 
but the same kind of feelings and motives. 
But this is not necessarily to think that they 
are capable of giving off a phantasm, as a 
man does when his soul temporarily leaves 
him, or when after death his soul becomes 
a ghost. There need be nothing ghost-like 
about the sun, whether it is imagined as a 
shining orb, or as a shining being of human 
shape to whom the orb belongs. There is 
not anything in the least phantasmal about 
the Greek god Apollo. I think, then, that 
we had better distinguish this wider sense 
of animism by a different name, calling it 
‘** animatism,’’ since that will serve at once to 
disconnect and to connect the two conceptions. 

I am not sure, however, how far we ought 
to press this “ doctrine of universal vitality.” 
Does a savage, for instance, when he is ham- 
mering at a piece of flint think of it as other 
than a “thing,” any more than we should ? 


RELIGION 231 


I doubt it. Hemay say “ Confound you!” if 
it suddenly snaps in two, just as we might do. 
But though the language may seem to imply 
a “‘ you,’”’ he would mean, I believe, to impute 
to the flint just as much, or as little, of person- 
ality as we should mean to do when using 
similar language. In other words, I believe 
that, within the world of his ordinary work- 
a-day experience, he recognizes both things 
and persons; without giving a thought, in 
either case, to the hidden principles that make 
them be what they are, and act as they do. 
When, on the other hand, the thing, or the 
person, falls within the world of supernormal 
_ experience, when they strike the imagination 
as wonderful and wonder-working, then there 
is much more reason why he should seek to 
account to himself for the mystery in, or be- 
hind, the strange appearance. Howitt, who 
knew his Australian natives intimately, cites 
the following as “ a good example of how the 
native mind works.’’ ‘To the black-fellow his 
club or his spear are part and parcel of his 
ordinary life. There is no “ medicine,’ no 
** devil,” in them. If they are to be made 
supernaturally potent, they must be specially 
charmed. But it is quite otherwise with his 
spear-thrower or his bull-roarer. The former 
for no obvious reason enables him to throw 
his spear extraordinarily far. (I have myself 


232 ANTHROPOLOGY 


seen! an Australian spear, with the help of 
the spear-thrower, fly a hundred and fifty 
yards, and strike true and deep at the end of 
its flight.) The latter emits the noise of 
thunder, though a mere chip of wood on the 
end of a string. These, then, are in them- 
selves ‘‘ medicine.’’. There is “‘ virtue ”’ in, or 
behind, them. 

Is, then, to attribute ‘‘ virtue”? the same 
thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality ? 
Are the spear-thrower and the _ bull-roarer 
inevitably thought of as alive? Orvare they, 
as a matter of course, endowed with soul or 
spirit ? Or may there be also an impersonal 
kind of ‘“* virtue,’ ‘“‘ medicine,”? or whatever 
the wonder-working power in the wonder- 
working thing is to be called ? Now there is 
evidence that the savage himself, in speaking 
about these matters, sometimes says power, 
sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit. But 
the simplest way of disposing of these questions 
is to remember that such fine distinctions as 
these, which theorists may seek to draw, do 
not appeal at all to the savage himself. For 
him the only fact that matters is that, whereas 
some things inthe world are ordinary, and 
can be reckoned on, other things cannot. be 
reckoned on, but are wonder-working. 

Moreover, of wonder-working things, some > 
are good and some are bad. ‘To get all the 


RELIGION 233 


good kind of wonder-workers on to his side, 
so as to confound the bad kind—that is what 
his religion is there to do for him. “ May 
_ blessings come, may mischiefs go!’ is the 
import of his religious striving, whether anthro- 
pologists class it as spell or as prayer. 

Now the function of religion, it has been 
assumed, is to restore confidence, when man 
is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of the 
mysteries that obtrude on his life, yet com- 
pelled, if not exactly wishful, to face them 
and wrest from them whatever help is in them. 
This function religion fulfils by what may be 
described in one word as “ suggestion.”” How 
the suggestion works psychologically—how, 
for instance, association of ideas, the so-called 
‘* sympathetic magic,’ predominates at the 
lower levels of religious experience—is a 
difficult and technical question which cannot 
be discussed here. Religion stands by when 
there is something to be done, and suggests 
that it can be done well and successfully; 
nay, that it is being so done. And, when the 
religion is of the effective sort, the believers 
respond to the suggestion, and put the thing 
through. As the Latin poet Says, “ they can 
because they think they can.’ 

What, from the anthropological point. of 
view, is the effective sort of religion, the sort 
that ‘survives because, on the whole, those 


23% ANTHROPOLOGY 


whom it helps survive? It is dangerous to 
make sweeping generalizations, but there is 
at any rate a good deal to be said for classing 
the world’s religions either as mechanical and 
ineffective, or as spiritual and effective. The 
mechanical kind offers its consolations in the 
shape of a set of implements. The “ virtue ”’ 
resides in certain rites and formularies. These, 
as we have seen, are especially liable to harden 
into mere mechanism when they are of 
the negative and precautionary type. The 
spiritual kind of religion, on the other hand, 
which is especially associated with the positive 
and active functions of life, tends to read 
will and personality into the wonder-working 
powers that it summons to man’s aid. The 
will and personality in the worshippers are in 
need not so much of implements as of more 
will and personality. They get this from a 
spiritual kind of religion; which in one way or 
another always suggests a society, a com- 
munion, as at once the means and the end of 
vital betterment. 

To say that religion works by suggestion is 
only to say that it works through the imagi- 
nation. There isgood make-believe as well as 
bad; and one must necessarily imagine and 
make-believe in order to will. The more or 
less inarticulate and intuitional forces of the 
mind, however, need to be supplemented by 


MORALITY 235 


the power of articulate reasoning, if the will 
is to make good its twofold character of a 
faculty of ends that is likewise a faculty of the 
means to those ends. Suggestion, in short, 
must be purged by criticism before it can 
serve as the guide of the higher life. To 
bring this point out will be the object of the 
following chapter. 


CHAPTER IX 
MORALITY 


SPACE is running out fast, and it is quite 
impossible to grapple with the details of so 
vast a subject as primitive morality. For 
these the reader must consult Dr. Wester- 
marck’s monumental treatise, The Origin 
and Development of the Moral Ideas, which 
brings together an immense quantity of facts, 
under a clear and comprehensive scheme of 
headings. He will discover, by the way, that, 
whereas customs differ immensely, the emo- 
tions, one may even say the sentiments, that 
form the raw material of morality are much 
the same everywhere. 

_ Here it will be of most use to sketch 
the psychological groundwork of primitive 


236 ANTHROPOLOGY 


morality, as contrasted with morality of the 
more advanced type. In pursuance of the 
plan hitherto followed, let us try to move yet 
another step on from the purely exterior view 
of human life towards our goal; which is to 
appreciate the true inwardness of human life 
—so far at least.as this is matter for anthro- 
pology, which reaches no farther than the 
historic method can take it. 

It is, of course, open to question whether 
either primitive or advanced morality is 
sufficiently of one piece to allow, as it were, a 
composite photograph to be framed of either. 
For our present purposes, however, this expe- 
dient is so serviceable as to be worth risking. 
Let us assume, then, that. there are two main 
stages in the historical evolution of society, 
as considered from the standpoint of the 
psychology of conduct. I propose to term 
them the synnomic and the syntelic phases 
of society. “‘Synnomic’’ (from the Greek 
nomos, custom) means that customs are 
shared. “‘ Syntelic’ (from the Greek felos, 
end) means that ends are shared. . 

The synnomic phase is, from the psycho- 
logical point of view, a kingdom of habit; the 
syntelic phase is a kingdom of reflection. The 
former is governed by a subconscious selection 
of its standards of good and bad; the latter 
by a conscious selection of its standards. It 


MORALITY 237 


remains to show very briefly how such a 
difference comes about. 

The outstanding fact about the synnomic 
life of the ruder peoples is perhaps this—that 
there is hardly any privacy. Of course, many 
other drawbacks must be taken into account 
also—no wide-thrown communications, no 
analytic language, no writing, no books, and 
so on; but perhaps being in a crowd all the 
time is the worst drawback of all. For, as 
Disraeli says in Sybil, gregariousness is not 
association. Constant herding and huddling 
together hinders the development of person- 
ality. That independence of character which 
is the prime condition of syntelic society 
cannot mature, even though the germs be 
there. No one has a chance of withdrawing 
into his own soul. Therefore the individual 
does not experience that silent conversation 
with self which is reflection. Instead of 
turning inwards, he turns outwards. In 
short, he imitates. 

But how, it may be objected, does evolution 
take place, if every one imitates every one else ? 
Certainly, it leoks at first sight like a vicious 
circle. Nevertheless, there is room for a 
certain progress, or at any rate for a certain 
process of change. To analyse its psycho- 
logical springs would take us too long. If a 
phrase will do instead of an explanation, we 


- 288 ANTHROPOLOGY 


may sum them up, with the brilliant French 
psychologist Tarde, as “a cross-fertilization 
of imitations.”” We need not, however, go 
far to get an impression of how this process 
of change works. It is going on every day 
in our midst under the name of “ change of 
fashion.’”? When one purchases the latest 
thing in ties or straw hats, one is not aiming 
at a rational form of dress. If there is 
progress in this direction, it is subconscious. 
The underlying spiritual condition is not 
inaptly described by Dr. Lloyd Morgan as “‘a 
sheep-through-the-gapishness.”’ 

From a moral point of view, this lack of 
capacity for private judgment is equivalent 
to a want of moral freedom. We have seen 
how relatively external are the sanctions of 
savage life. This does not mean, of course, 
that there is no answering judgment in the 
mind of the individual when he follows his 
customs. He says, “It is the custom; 
therefore it is right.”” But this judgment can 
scarcely be said to proceed from a _ truly 
judging, that is to say, critical, self. The man 
watches his neighbours, taking his cue from 
them. His judgment is a judgment of sense. 
He does not look inwards to principle. A 
moral principle is a standard that can, by 
means of thought, be transferred from one 
sensible situation to another sensible situation. 


MORALITY 239 


The general law, and its application to the 
situation present now to the senses, are 
considered apart, before being put together. 
Consequently, a possible application, however 
strongly suggested by custom, fashion, the 
action of one’s neighbours, one’s own impulse 
or prejudice, or what not, can be resisted, if it 
appéar on reflection not to be really suited to 
the circumstances. In short, in order to be 
rational and “ put two and two together,” 
one must be able to entertain two and two 
as distinct conceptions. Perceptions, on the 
contrary, can only be compared in the lump. 
Just as in the chapter on language we saw 
how man began by talking in holophrases, and 
only gradually attained to analytic, that is, 
separable, elements of speech, so in this 
chapter we have to note the strictly parallel 
development from confusion to distinction 
on the side of thought. 

Savage morality, then, is not rational in | 
the sense of analysed, but is, so to speak, © 
impressionistic. We might, perhaps, describe — 
it as the expression of a collective impression. 
It is best understood in the light of that 
branch of social psychology which usually 
goes by the name of “ mob-psychology.”’ 
Perhaps mob and mobbish are rather unfor- 
tunate terms. They are apt to make us think 
of the wilder explosions of collective feeling— 


240 ANTHROPOLOGY 


panics, blood-mania, dancing-epidemics, and 
so on. But, though a savage society is by 
no means a mob in the sense of a welter- 
ing mass of humanity that has for the time 
being lost its head, the psychological con- 
siderations applying to the latter apply also 
to the former, when due allowance has been 
made for the fact that savage society is 
organized on a permanent basis. The differ- 
ence between the two comes, in short, to this, 
that the mob as represented in the savage 
society is a mob consisting of many successive 
generations of men. Its tradition constitutes, 
as it were, a prolonged and abiding impression, 
which its conduct thereupon expresses. 
Savage thought, then, is not able, because 
it does not try, to break up custom into 
separate pieces. Rather it plays round the 
edges of custom; religion especially, with its 
suggestion of the general sacredness of custom, 
helping it to do so. There is found in primi- 
tive society plenty of vague speculation that 
seeks to justify the existing. But to take 
the machine to bits in order to put it together 
differently is out of the reach of a type of 
intelligence which, though competent to 
grapple with details, takes its principles for 
granted. When progress comes, it comes by 
stealth, through imitating’ the letter, but 
refusing to imitate the spirit; until by means 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 241 


of legal] fictions, ritual substitutions, and so 
on, the new takes the place of the old without 
any one noticing the fact. 

Freedom, in the sense of intellectual free- 
dom, may perhaps be said to have been born 
in one place and at one time—namely, in > 
Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.c.} 
Of course, minglings and clashings of peoples 
had prepared the way. Ideas begin to count 
as soon as they break away from their local 
context. But Greece, in teaching the world 
the meaning of intellectual freedom, paved a 
way towards that most comprehensive form 
of freedom which is termed moral. Moral 
freedom is the will to give out more than you 
take in; to repay with interest the cost of 
your social education. It is the will to take 
thought about the meaning and end of human 
life, and by so doing to assist in creative 
evolution. 


CHAPTER X 
MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 


By way of epilogue, a word about indi- 
viduality, as displayed amongst peoples of 


1 Political freedom, which is rather a different matter, is 
perhaps pre-eminently the discovery of England. 
ois ) 


242 ANTHROPOLOGY 


the ruder type, will not be out of place. 
There is a real danger lest the anthropologist 
should think that a scientific view of man is to 
be obtained by leaving out the human nature 
in him. This comes from the over-anxiety 
of evolutionary history to arrive at general 
principles. It is too ready to rule out the 
so-called “‘ accident,” forgetful of the fact that 
the whole theory of biological evolution may 
with some justice be described as “ the happy 
accident theory.”” The man of high indi- 
viduality, then, the exceptional man, the man 
of genius, be he man of thought, man of feeling, 
or man of action, is no accident that can be 
overlooked by history. On the contrary, he 
is in no small part the history-maker; and, 
as such, should be treated with due respect 
by the history-compiler. The “dry bones ”’ 
of history, its statistical averages, and so on, 
are all very well in their way; but they corre- 
spond to the superficial truth that history 
repeats itself, rather than to the deeper truth 
that history is an evolution. Anthropology, 
then, should not disdain what might be termed 
the method of the historical novel. To study 
the plot without studying the characters will 
never make sense of the drama of human 
life. 

It may seem a truism, but is perhaps worth 
recollecting at the start, that no man or woman 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 243 


lacks individuality altogether, even if it 
cannot be regarded in a particular case as a 
high individuality. No one is a mere item. 
That useful figment of the statistician has no 
real existence under the sun. We need to 
supplement the books of abstract theory with 
much sympathetic insight directed towards 
men and women in their concrete selfhood. 
Said a Vedda cave-dweller to Dr. Seligmann 
(it is the first instance I light on in the first 
book I happen to take up): “It is pleasant 
for us to feel the rain beating on our shoulders, 

and good to go out and dig yams, and come 
~ home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave, 
and sit round it.’’ That sort of remark, 
to my mind, throws more light on the anthro- 
pology of cave-life than all the bones and 
stones that I have helped to dig out of our 
Mousterian caves in Jersey. As the stock 
phrase has it, it is, as far as it goes, a ‘‘ human 
document.” The individuality, in the sense 
of the intimate self-existence, of the speaker 
and his group—for, characteristically enough, 
he uses the first person plural—is disclosed 
sufficiently for our souls to get into touch. 
We are the nearer to appreciating human 
history from the inside. 

Some of those students of mankind, there- 
fore, who have been privileged to live amongst 
the ruder peoples, and to learn their language 


244 ANTHROPOLOGY 


well, and really to be friends with some of 
them (which is hard, since friendship implies 
a certain sense of equality on both sides), 
should try their hands at anthropological 
biography. Anthropology, so far as it relates 
to savages, can never rise to the height of the 
most illuminating kind of history until this 
is done. 

It ought not to be impossible for an in- 
telligent white man to enter sympathetically 
into the mental outlook of the native man of 
affairs, the more or less practical and hard- 
headed legislator and statesman, if only 
complete confidence could be _ established 
between the two. That there are men of 
outstanding individuality who help to make 
political history even amongst the rudest 
peoples is, moreover, hardly to be doubted. 
Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, in the 
introductory chapter of their work on the 
Central Australians, state that, after observing 
the conduct of a great gathering of the natives, 
they reached the opinion that the changes 
which undoubtedly take place from time to 
time in aboriginal custom are by no means 
wholly of the subconscious and spontaneous 
sort, but are in part due also to the influence 
of individuals of superior ability. “ At this 
gathering, for example, some of the oldest 
men were of no account; but, on the other 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 245 


hand, others not so old as they were, but 
mere learned in ancient lore or more skilled 
in matters of magic, were looked up to by 
the others, and they it was who settled every- 
thing. It must, however, be understood that 
we have no definite proof to bring forward 
of the actual introduction by this means of 
any fundamental change of custom. The 
only thing that we can say is that, after care- 
fully watching the natives during the perform- 
ance of their ceremonies and endeavouring as 
best we could to enter into their feelings, to 
think as they did, and to become for the time 
being one of themselves, we came to the con- 
clusion that if one or two of the most powerful 
men settled upon the advisability of intro- 
ducing some change, even an important one, 
it would be quite possible for this to be agreed 
upon and carried out.”’ 

This passage is worth quoting at length if 
only for the admirable method that it dis- 
closes. The policy of “trying to become for 
the time being one of themselves ”’ resulted in 
the book that, of all first-hand. studies, has 
done most for modern anthropology. At the 
same time Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, it is 
evident, would not claim to have done more 
than interpret the external signs of a high 
individuality on the part of these prominent 
natives. It still remains a rare and almost 


246 ANTHROPOLOGY 


unheard-of thing for an anthropologist to be 
on such friendly terms with a savage as to get 
him to talk intimately about himself, and 
reveal the real man within. 

There exist, however, occasional side-lights 
on human personality in the anthropological 
literature that has to do with very rude 
peoples. The page from a human document 
that I shall cite by way of example is all the 
more curious, because it relates to a type of 
experience quite outside the compass of 
ordinary civilized folk. Here and _ there, 
however, something like it may be found 
amongst ourselves. My friend Dr. L. P. 
Jacks, for instance, in his story-book, Mad 
Shepherds, has described a rustic of the north 
of England who belonged to this old-world 
order of great men. For men of the type in 
question can be great, at any rate in low-level 
society. The so-called medicine man is a 
leader, perhaps even the typical leader, of 
primitive society; and, just because he is, by 
reason of his calling, addicted to privacy and 
aloofness, he certainly tends to be more 
individual, more of a ‘* character,”’ than the 
general run of his fellows. 

I shall slightly condense from Howitt’s 
Native Tribes of South-East Australia the man’s 
own story of his experience of initiation. 
Howitt says, by the way, “I feel strongly 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 247 


assured that the man believed that the events 
which he related were real, and that he had 
actually experienced them”; and then goes 
on to talk about “ subjective realities.” I 
myself offer no commentary. Those inter- 
ested in psychical research will detect hypnotic 
trance, levitation, and so forth. Others, 
versed in the spirit of William James’ V arieties 
of Religious Experience, will find an even deeper 
meaning init all. The sociologist, meanwhile, 
will point to the force of custom and _ tradition 
as colouring the whole experience, even when 
at its most subjective and dreamlike. But 
each according to his bent must work out 
these things for himself. In any case it is 
well that the end of a book should leave the 
reader still thinking. 

The speaker was a Wiradjuri doctor of the 
Kangaroo totem. He said: ‘ My father is a 
Lizard-man. When I was a small boy, he 
took me into the bush to train me to be a 
doctor. He placed two large quartz-crystals 
against my breast, and they vanished into 
me. I do not know how they went, but I 
felt them going through me like warmth. 
This was to make me clever, and able to bring 
things up.”’ (This refers to the medicine-man’s 
custom of bringing up into the mouth, as if 
from the stomach, the quartz-crystal in which 
his “‘ virtue ”’ has its chief material embodiment 


248 ANTHROPOLOGY 


-or symbol; being likewise useful, as we see 
later on, for hypnotizing purposes.) ‘‘ Healso 
gave me some things like quartz-crystals in 
water. They looked like ice, and the water 
tasted sweet. After that, I used to see things 
that my mother could not see. When out 
with her I would say, * What is out there like 
men walking?’ She used to say, ‘ Child, 
there is nothing.’ These were the ghosts 
which I began to see.” 

The account goes on to state that at puberty 
our friend went through the regular initiation 
for boys; when he saw the doctors bringing 
up their crystals, and, crystals in mouth, 
shooting the ‘‘ virtue ” into him to make him 
‘“‘ good.”? Thereupon, being in a holy state like 
any other novice, he had retired to the bush 
in the customary manner to fast and meditate. 

** Whilst I was in the bush, my old father 
came out tome. He said, ‘ Come here to me,’ 
and then he showed me a piece of quartz- 
crystal in his hand. When I looked at it, he 
went down into the ground; and I saw him 
come up all covered with red dust. It made 
me very frightened. Then my father said, 
‘Try and bring up a crystal.’ I did try, and 
brought one up. He then said, * Come with 
me to this place.’ Isaw him standing by a hole 
in the ground, leading to a grave. I went 
inside and saw a dead man, who rubbed me all 


MAN THE INDIVIDUAL 249 


over to make me clever, and gave me some 
crystals. When we came out, my father 
pointed to a tiger-snake, saying, ‘ That is your 
familiar. It is mine also.’ There was a 
string extending from the tail of the snake to 
us—one of those strings which the medicine- 
men bring up out of themselves. My father 
took hold of the string, and said, ‘ Let us 
follow the snake.’ The snake went through 
several tree-trunks, and let us through them. 
At last we reached a tree with a great swelling 
round its roots. It is in such places that 
Daramulun lives. The snake went down into. 
the ground, and came up inside the tree, which 
was hollow. We followed him. There I saw 
a lot of little Daramuluns, the sons of Baiame. 
Afterwards, the snake took us into a great 
hole, in which were a number of snakes. These 
rubbed themselves against me, and did not 
hurt me, being my familiars. They did this 
to make me a clever man and a doctor. 
‘*Then my father said, ‘ We will go up to 
Baiame’s Camp.’ [Amongst the Wiradjuri, 
Baiame is the high god, and Daramulun is his 
son. What ‘little Daramuluns’ may be is 
not very clear.| He got astride a thread, and 
put me on another, and we held by each other’s 
arms. At the end of the thread was Wombu, 
the bird of Baiame. We went up through the 
clouds, and.on the other side wasthesky We 


250 ANTHROPOLOGY 


went through the place where the doctors go 
through, and it kept opening and shutting 
very quickly. My father said that, if it 
touched a doctor when he was going through, 
it would hurt his spirit, and when he returned 
home he would sicken and die. On the other 
side we saw Baiame sitting in his camp. He 
was a very great old man with a long beard. 
He sat with his legs under him, and from his 
shoulders extended two great quartz-crystals 
to the sky above him. There were also 
numbers of the boys of Baiame, and of his 
people who are birds and beasts. [The 
totems. ] 

‘** After this time, and while I was in the 
bush, I began to bring crystals up; but I 
became very ill, and cannot do anything 
since.” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Intropuctory NotTr.—lIt is impossible to provide a biblio- 
graphy of so vast a subject, even when first-class authorities 
only are referred to; whilst selection must be arbitrary and 
invidious. Here books written in English are alone cited, and 
those mostly the more modern. The reader is advised to spend 
such time as he can give to the subject mostly on the descriptive 
treatises. A few very educative studies are marked by an 
asterisk. In many cases, to save space, merely the author’s 
name with initials is given, and a library catalogue must be 
consulted, or a list of authors such as is to be found, e.g. at the 
end of Westermarck’s works. 


A. THEORETICAL 


GENERAL.—E. B. Tylor, Anthropology* (best manual) ; 
Primitive Culture* (the greatest of anthropological 
classics) ; Lord Avebury’s works; Anthropological Essays 
presented to EB. B. Tylor. 


ANTIQUITY OF Man.—W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and thewr 
Modern Representatives (best popular account). Subject 
difficult without special knowledge, te be derived from, e.g. 
Sir J. Evans (Stone Implements) ; J. Geikie (Geology of Ice 
Age), ete. See also Brit. Mus. Guides to Stone Age, 
Bronze Age, Early Iron Age. 

RacE AND GEOGRAPHICAL DIstriBUTION.—A. C. Haddon, 
Races of Man and The Wanderings of Peoples (best short 
outlines to work from); fuller details in J. Deniker, A. 
H. Keane; and, for Europe, W. Z. Ripley. See also Brit. 
Mus. Guide to Ethnological Collections. 


SociAL ORGANIZATION AND Law.—J. G. Frazer, Tolemism 
and Exogamy*; L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society*; E. 
Westermarck, History of Human Marriage*; E. S. 
Hartland, Primitive Paternity ; A. Lang, The Secret of the 
Totem; N. W. Thomas, Kinship Organization and Group 
Marriage in Australia; H. Webster, Primitive Secret 
Socteties. - 

251 


252 BIBLIOGRAPHY 


RELiIGion, Macic, Forx-Ltorn.—J. G. Frazer, The Golden 
Bough* (3rd edit.) ; E. S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus 
(esp. vol. ii); A. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion,* The 
Making of Religion, ete. ; W. Robertson Smith, Early 
Religion of the Semites* ; F. B. Jevons, A. C. Crawley, 


D. G. Brinton, G. L. Gomme, L. R. Farnell, R. R. 


Marett, etc. 


Moraus.—E. Westermarck, Origin and Development of the 
Moral Ideas* ; E. B. Tylor, Contemp. Rev. xxi-ii; L. T, 
Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution; <A, Sutherland, Origin 
and Growth of the Moral Instinct. 


MIscELLANEOUS.—Language: E. J. Payne, History of the New 
World called America,* vol. ii, Art: Y. Hirn, Origins of 
Art.* Economics: P. J. H. Grierson, The Silent Trade. 


B. DESCRIPTIVE 


AusTRALIA.—B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of 
Central Australia,* Northern Tribes of Central Australia ; 
A. W. Howitt, Native Tribes of South-east Australia* ; 
J. Woods (and others), Native 7'ribes of South Australia N 
L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, Kamilarot and Kurnai ; 
H. Ling Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania. 


OCEANIA AND InNpDoNESIA.—R. H. Codrington, The Mela- 
nesians™ ; B. H. Thompson, The Fijians; A. O. Haddon 
(and others), Report of Cambridge Expedition to Torres 
Straits; C. G. Seligmann (for New Guinea); G. Turner, 
W. Ellis, E. Shortland, R. Taylor (for Polynesia); A. R. 
Wallace, Malay Archipelago ; O. Hose and W. McDougall 
(for Indonesia), 


Asta.—J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China ; 
W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas*; and a host of other good 
authorities for India, e.g. Sir H. H. Risley, E. Thurston, 
W. Crooke, T. C. Hodson, P. R. T. Gurdon, C. G. and 
B. Z. Seligmann (Veddas of Ceylon); E. H. Man, Journ. 
kt. Anthrop. Instit. xii (Andamanese); W. Skeat (for 
Malay Peninsula). 


Arrica.—South: H. Callaway, E. Casalis, J. Maclean, D. Kidd, 
H. Junod. East: A. C. Hollis, J. Roscoe. W.S. and K. 
Routledge, A. Werner. West: M. H. Kingsley, A. B.- 
Ellis, A. J. Tremearne. Madagascar: W. Ellis. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 


AwmerRica.—A vast number of important works, see esp. 
Smithsonian Institution, Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology 
(J. ‘W. Powell, F. Boas, F. Cushing, A. C. Fletcher, 
M. C. Stevenson, J. R. Swanton, C. Mindeleff, S. Powers, 
J. Mooney, J. O. Dorsey, W. J. Hoffman, W. J. McGee, 
etc.) ; L. H. Morgan (on Iroquois), J. ‘leit, C. Hill Tout ; 
C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico; Sir E. im Thurn, Among 
the Indians of Guiana, 

Evropr.—Ancient: L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States ; 
J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to Greek Religion, Themis, 
and Art and Ritual; W. Warde Fowler, Religious Ex- 
perience of the Roman People; Anthropology and the 
Classics, etc. Modern: G. F. Abbott, C. Lawson (to com- 
pare modern with ancient), Folk-lore Society’s Publi- 
cations, etc. 


C. SUBSIDIARY 


C. Darwin, Descent of Man (Part 1); W. Bagehot, Physics 
and Politics* ; W. James, Varieties of Religious Haperience* ; 
W. McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychofogy.* And in 
this series Geddes and Thomson, Newbigin, Myres, McDougall, 
Keith and Munro, 


INDEX 


ADULTERY, 195 

Africans, 41, 100, 118, 127, 158, 193, 
194, 195, 199 

Age-grades, 176 

Alpine race, 106 

Altainira, 52 

Americans, 40, 97, 100, 110-114, 124, 
128, 183, 138-147, 157, 163, 174, 
192, 199 

Andamanese, 160, 188, 198 

Anglo-Saxons, 193 

Animatism, 230 

Animist, 228, 230 

Anthropo-geography, 23, 84, 95-101, 
115, 129 

Anthropoid apes, 23, 37, 76-79, 81, 
84, 111, 115, 117 

Anthropology, 7-30, 186, 204, 227, 
242, 244 

Asiatics, 37, 59, 82, 99, 105-111, 114- 
118, 120-122, 128, 132, 133, 142, 
150, 160-162, 183, 188, 194, 216-219 

Athapascan. languages, 112 

Atlantic phase of culture, 102 

Aurignac, 48 

Australians, 39, 49, 51, 52, 54, 118, 
120, 127, 147, 157, 162, 167, 174, 
190, 191, 198, 207, 219-227, 231, 
244-250 


Bagehot, W., 84, 185, 187, 201 
Baiame, 249, 250 

Balfour, H., 40 

Basque language, 55, 182, 134 
Biology, 10, 13 

Bison, 49, 51, 79, 100 
Blood-revenge, 189-194 

Boas, F., 75, 85 

Borneo, 101, 184 

Brandon, 56, 59 

Bronze-age, 32, 55, 107 
Bull-roarer, 125-128, 207, 226, 231 
Burial, 35, 79, 177, 202, 206, 248 
Bushmen, 39, 81, 87, 108, 119, 126, 


160 
Butler, 8., 66 
Buzz, 128 


Calaveras skull, 40 

Cannibalism, 37 

Cartailhac, E., 84 

Carthaze, 105 

Caste, 144, 179 

Cave-paintings, 21, 47-58, 221 

Chelles, 77 

China, 106, 108, 115, 142 

Chukchis, 110 

Clan, 161, 171, 175, 189, 197, 208 

Class (matrimonial), 172 

Climate, 83-86, 101, 103, 117, 156 

Cogul, 53 

Collective responsibility, 189, 192 

Colour, 82-86 

Commont, V., 83 

Confederacy, 174 

Consanguinity, 163 

Conservatism of savage, 118, 124, 
188, 184, 213, 245 

Counting, 25, 148, 150 

Cranial index, 74 

Cranz, D., 191 

Creswell Crags, 47 

Cro-Magnon, 80 

Custoin, 38, 183-187, 213-215, 223, 
227, 238, 245, 247 


Dahomey, 158, 194 

Dairy-ritual, 216-219 

Daramulun, 207, 226, 249 

ili C., 8-11, 22, 64, 65, 69, 182, 
15 

Demolins, E., 98, 111 

Differential evolution, 121 

Dog, 118 

Dubois, E., 76 

Duel, 191, 195, 198 


Egypt, 102, 105, 107, 115 

Endogamy, 165, 173 

Environment, 69, 70, 75, 93, 94- 
129 

Koliths, 41-43 

Eskimo, 39, 111, 190, 191 

Eugenics, 63, 70, 93, 95 

Eurasian region, 106-110 


254 


INDEX 


Europeans, 33-59, 75, 77-82, 93, 102- 
105, 108, 109, 124, 126, 127, 133, 
185, 193, 202, 230, 241 

Evans, Sir J. , 42, 124 

“et amet 7-12, 14, 22, 61-72, 136, 


Exogamy, oo 161-165, 168, 169, 
172, 173, 2 
ricinental psychology, 23, 88 


Family, 159, 160, 164, 171, 178, 196 
Fanily jurisdiction, 196 
Flint-mining, 56, 57 

Folk-lore, 186, 210 

Frazer, J. G., 168, 172, 200 
Freedom, 130, 154, 181, 185, 238, 241 
Fuegians, 128-140, 145 


Galley Hill skull, 46, 80 
Gargas, 47-50 

Genealogical method, 147 
Gesture-langnage, 134, 149 
Ghosts, 229, 230, 248 
Gibraltar skull, 78 

Greece, 127, 18, ates 185, 241 
Greenwell, W., 

Grime’s Graves, 86 


Haddon, A. H., 88, 127 
Haeckel, E., 118 
Hand-prints, 49 
Harrison, B., 41, 44 
Head-form, 73-82, 107 
Head-hunting, 185 
Heidelberg inandible, 77 
History, 11, 13-16, 80, 97, 156, 227, 
242 
Hittites, 107 
Hobhonse, L. T.,160 . 
Holophrase, 140-152, 289 
Horse, 37, 50, 100, 108 
Howitt, A. W., 163, 231, 246 
Humility, 212 


Tee-age, 21, 38, 86, 38, 46, 106, 112, 
182 


Icklingham, 28 

Imagination, 28, 218, 223, 234 

Incest, 189, 200 

India, 115 

Individuality, 29, 241-250 

Indo-European languages, 133 

Indonesia, 116, 118, 121, 184 ; 

Initiation, 127, 174, 176, 211, 224- 
227, 246-250 

Instinct, 23, 68, 71, 89-91 


255 


Intichiuma ceremonies, 51, 167, 220- 
223 
Tron-age, 40, 119 


Jacks, L. P., 246 
James, W., 247 
Jersey, 32, 36, 45, 243 


Kellor, F. A., 91 

Kent’s cavern, 46 
Kingship, 194, 195, 200, 202 
Kinship, 163, 177 
Knappers, 57, 58 

Koryaks, 110 


La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 79 
Lamarck, J. B., 64, 65 
La Naulette mandible, 78 
Lang, A., 187, 226 
Language, 24, 130-152 
Lapps, 110 

Law, 26, 181-203 

Lecky, T., 102 

Le Moustier, 38, 45-47, 7: 
Le Play, F., 98 
Lévy-Bruhl, L., 188 
Lineage, 165, 168 

Lloyd Morgan, C., 238 
Local association, 177 
Luck, 167, 200, 213, 215 


McDougall, W., 90 

Madagascar, 114, 158 

Magic, 27, 51, 177, 202, 208-210, 
224, 245, 247 

Malays, 114, 122, 126 

Malthus, T., 69, 187 

Mammoth, 87, 78, 111, 132 

Man, E. H., 188, 198 

Mas ‘a’ Azil,. 54 


Masks, 53 
Matriarchate, 166 
Matrilineal, matrilocal, matyri- 


potestal, 165, 196 
Medicine-man, 246-250 
Mediterranean race, 104, 109, 119 
Melanesians, 116, 121, 128 
Mendelism, 67 
Mentone, 35 
Military discipline, 192, 199 
Miscegenation, 93 
Mob-psychology, 92, 201, 239-241 
Moieties, 175 
Morality, 29, 285-241 
Mother-right, 166, 169, 197 
Myres, J. L., 102 


256 


Nation, 174 

Natural selection, 68-71, 84 

Nature, 15, 82, 155, 211, 230 

Neanderthal race, 37, 39, 77-81, 87, 
120, 206 

Negative rites, 216-219, 234 

Negritos, 81, 116-118, 120, 160, 188 

Negro race, 80, 91, 116, 120 

Neolithic aye, 40, 53-59, 81, 104, 109 

Niaux, 50-53 

Nordic race, 109 


Ordeal, 191, 195 


Pacation, 192, 195 

Painted pebbles, 54 

Paleolithic age, 40, 43-54, 108, 124 

Papuasians, 116 

Patagonians, 114 

Patrilineal, — patrilocal, 
potestal, 165, 196 

Payne, EK. J., 138 

Persecuting teudency, 187 

Perthes, Boucher de, 43 

Phantasm, 229 

Philosophy, 15-17, 72, 154, 223 

Phratry, 172 

Pictographs, 51 

Pithecanthropus erectus, 76, 115 

Policy, 17-19 

Polynesians, 121, 128, 183, 194 

Positive rites, 219-224, 234 

Pottery, 33, 55 

Pre-Dritvidians, 120 

Pre-histor'¢ chronology, 34 

Pre-history, 21, 31, 97, 111 

Pre-natal environment, 94 

Prestwich, Sir J., 42 

Profane vessels, 217 

Property, 179, 192, 195, 198 

Proto-history, 31, 97 


patri- 


Quartz crystals, 248-250 


Race, 22, 59-94, 96, 99 

Ratzel, F., 98 

Reincarnation, 167, 221, 224 

Reindeer, 37, 55, 78, 106, 110 

Religion, 27, 49, 127, 166-165, 204- 
235, 246-250 

Ridgeway, W., 107 

Rites, 212, 219-224, 234 

River-phase of culture, 102 


INDEX 


Rivers, W. H. R., 147, 216, 219 
Rutot, A., 41, 46 


Sacramental meal, 222 

Sacredness, 28, 52, 127, 168, 203, 213, 
217, 218, 224, 226 

St. Acheul, 33, 45, 46 

Sanction, 195, 203 

Savagery, 11, 158 

Science, 12-15 

Secret Societies, 177 

Seligmann, C. G. and B. Z., 161, 243 

Sex-totems, 176 

Shaw, B., 66 

Slander, 198 

Slavery, 179 

Smith, W. Robertson, 213 

Snare, F., 57 

Social organization, 24-26, 152-181 

Solutré, 47, 108 

Spear-thrower, 231 

Spencer, B.. and Gillen, F. J., 89, 
163, 175, 220, 244 

Spirit, 228, 229 

Steinmetz, 8. R., 197 

Stratigraphical method, 31-36 

Suggestion, 233-235, 237-240 

Survivals, 186 

Sutherland, A., 157 

Sympathetic magic, 126, 233 

Synnomic phase of society, 236 

Syntelic phase of society, 236 


Taboo, 200-203, 215, 218 
Tasmanians, 39-44 


_ Thames gravels, 38-44, 46 


Theft, 198 

Todas, 210-219 

Torres Straits, 88 

Totemism, 160, 166-168, 175, 189, 
220-223, 250 

Tribe, 173 

Tylor, E. B., 184, 228-230 


Use-inheritance, 64, 93 


Variation, 66-68 
Veddas, 120, 160, 248 


Wallace, A. R., 69, 118, 184 
Wealden dome, 43 
Weismann, A., 65, 66 
Westermarck, E., 235 
Witchcraft, 202, 210 


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ourler. 


31. ASTRONOMY 
By A. R. Hinxs, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory. ‘' Original 
in thought. . . . No better little book is available.”’—School World. 


32. IVTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 


By J. ARTHUR THOomsOoN, M.A. ‘‘ Professor Thomson discourses freshly and 
easily on the methods of science and its relations with philosophy, art, religion, 
and practical life.” —A derdeen Journal. 


36. CLIMATE AND WEATHER 


By Prof. H. N. Dickson, D.Sc.Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E. (With Diagrams.) 
‘* Presented in a very lucid and agreeable manner.”—Manchester Guardian. 


41. ANTHROPOLOGY 


By R. R. Maretr,M.A. ‘‘An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a 
child could understand it, so fascinating and human that it beats fiction ‘toa 
frazzle.’”—Morning Leader. 


Bante PRINCIPLES OF PH VSIOLOGY 


By Prof. J. G. McKenpricx, M.D. ‘‘Upon every page of it is stamped 
the impress of a creative imagination.”—Glasgow Herald. 


46. MATTER AND ENERGY 
By F. Soppy, M.A., F.R.S.  ‘‘ Prof. Soddy has successfully accomplished 
the very difficult task of making physics of absorbing interest.”—Vature. 

gor eo YCAHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR 


By Prof. W. McDoucatt, F.R.S., M.B. ‘‘A happy example of the non- 
technical handling of an unwieldy science.”—Christian World. 


53. THE MAKING OF THE EARTH 
By Prof. J. W. Grecory, F.R.S. (With 38 Maps and Figures.) ‘A 
fascinating little volume.” —The Atheneum. 

57. THE HUMAN BODY 


By A. Kurru, M.D., LL.D. (llustrated.) It will certainly take a high place + 
among the classics of popular science.” —Manchester Guardian. 


58. ELECTRICITY 


By Gispert Kapp, D.Eng. (Illustrated.) ‘‘It will be appreciated greatly 
- . . one of the most fascinating of scientific studies.” —G/lasgow Herald. 


5 


62. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE 


neat. sat Re neds allied hastens licshalmlmialeiss dedi iets ee a a!) Sewn! 2. oe 
By Dr Benjamin Moors, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, University College, 
Liverpool. ‘‘ Stimulating, learned, lucid.”—Liverpool Courier. 


67. CHEMISTRY 


By Rapuart Me.pora,F.R.S. Presents clearly the way in which chemical 
science has developed, and the stage it has reached. 


72. PLANT LIFE 


By Prof. J. B. Farmer, D.Sc., F.R.S. (Tlustrated.) ‘‘ Conveys all the most 
vital facts of plant physiology, and presents a good many of the chief problems 
which confront investigators to-day.”—Morning Post. 


78. THE OCEAN 


A General Account of the Science of the Sea. By Sir Jounn Murray, K.C.B., 
F.R.S. (Colour plates and other illustrations.) 


79. NERVES 


By Prof. D. Fraser Harris, M.D., D.Sc. (Illustrated.) A description, in 
non-technical language, of the nervous system, its intricate mechanism and the 
strange phenomena of energy and fatigue, with some practical reflections. 


86. SEX 


By Prof.. Parrick Greppsxs and Prof. J. ARTHUR THomson, LL.D. ‘‘It is 
full of human interest, and gives just that mixture of criticism and enthusiasm 
which students expect to receive.”—Hducational Ties. 


88. THE GROWTA OF EVROPE 


By Prof. GRENVILLE CoLe. (lllustrated.) ‘‘ Particularly acceptable in this 
country—the story of our own islands is touched with much skill.”—Dazly 
Express. 


Philosophy and Religion 


15,5 MOHAMMEDANISM 


By Prof. D. S. Marcorioutu, M.A., D.Litt. ‘‘This generous shilling’s 
worth of wisdom. . . . A delicate, humorous tractate.”—Daily Mati. 


40. THE, PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 


By the Hon. Bertrand RussELL, F.R.S. ‘A book that the ‘man in the 
street’ will recognise at once to be a boon.” —Christian World. 


7. BUDDHISM 


~By Mrs Ruys Davins, M.A, “The author presents very attractively as well 
as very learnedly the philosophy of Buddhism.”—Dazly News. 


50. VONCONFORMITY: Its ORIGIN and PROGRESS 


By Principal W. B. Se.piz, M.A. ‘‘ The historical part is brilliant in its 
insight, clarity, and proportion.”—C4ristian World. 


64. ETHICS 


By G. E. Moore, M.A. ‘‘A very lucid though closely reasoned outline of 
the logic of good conduct.”—Christiax World. 


56. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 


By Prof. B. W. Bacon, LL.D., D.D. “ Anextraordinarily vivid, stimulating, 
and lucid book.” —Manchester Guardian. 


60. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE and DEVELOPMENT 


By Mrs CrEeIGHTON. ‘‘ Very interestingly done. ... Its style is simple, 
direct, unhackneyed, and should find appreciation.” —Methodist Recorder. 















b 














y 68. COMPARATIVE RELIGION 


By Prof. J. Estrin CarrenTer, D.Litt. ‘‘ Puts into the reader’s hand a 
wealth of learning and independent thought.” —Christian World. 


44. A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT 


By J. B. Bury, Litt.D., LL.D. ‘A little masterpiece, which every thinking 
man will enjoy.”—7e Observer. 


84. LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 


By Prof. Gzorce Moore, D.D., LL.D. ‘‘ An entirely competent and satis- 
factory introduction.”—Christian Commonwealth. 


90. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 


By Canon E. W. Warson. ‘‘ He has plainly endeavoured, in our judgment 
with success, to weigh every movement in the Church by its permanent con- 
tribution to the life of the whole.”—Ssectator. 


94. RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT BETWEEN THE 


.> OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS 


By Canon R. H. CuHaries, D.D., D.Litt. ‘‘Dr Charles has rendered 
valuable service in providing a sketch of this literature.” — 77zmes. 


102, HJSTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 


By Crement C. J. Wess. ‘‘A wonderful little book. Mr Webb compresses 
into 250 pages a subject-matter of perhaps unequalled complexity.”—Wew 
Statesman. 


Social Science 





1. PARLIAMENT 


Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir Courrenay P. Ivsert, 
7 G.C.B., K.C.S.1.. ‘‘ The best book on the history and practice of the House 


of Commons since Bagehot’s ‘Constitution.’” —Vorkshire Post. 

Rel HE STOCK EXCHANGE 
By F. W. Hirst, Editor of ‘‘ The Economist.” ‘‘To an unfinancial mind must 
be arevelation.. . . The bookis clear, vigorous, and sane.”—Morning Leader. 


6. IRISH NATIONALITY 


By Mrs J. R. Green. ‘As glowing as it is learned. No book could be more 
timely.”—Dazly News. . 


io. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 


By J. Ramsay MacDona.tp, M.P. ‘‘Admirably adapted for the purpose ot 
exposition.”— The Times. 


11. CONSERVATISM 


By Lorp Hucu Cercit, M.A., M.P. ‘‘One of those great little books which 
seldom appear more than once in a generation.”—/Morning Post. 


16. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH 


By J. A. Hopson, M.A. ‘‘Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among 
living-economists. . . . Original, reasonable, and illuminating.”’— 7e Nation. 


21. LIBERALISM 


By L.T. Hosuouse, M.A. ‘‘A book of rare quality. . . . We have nothing 
but praise for the rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from first 
principles which form a large part of this book.” —Westminster Gazette. 


24. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 


’ By D. H, Maccrecor, M.A. ‘‘A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read 
with profit by all interested in the present state of unrest.” —A derdeen Journal, 


7 


26. AGRICULTURE 


By Prof. W. Somervittz, F.L.S. “Tt makes the results of laboratory work 
at the University accessible to the practical farmer.” —A theneum. 


30. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW 


Dla lacieks oa retire fer er aS naan See Se aa 
By W. M. Gecpart, M.A., B.C.L. ‘‘ Containsa very clear account of the ele- 
mentary principles underlying the rules of English law.”—Scots Law Times. 


38. THE SCHOOL: An Introduction to the Study of Education 


By J. J. Finpvay, M.A., Ph.D. ‘‘ An amazingly comprehensive volume. . .. 
It is a remarkable performance.”—Morning Post. 


59. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 


“Ay Nonaaliencbaratinl Severraseeell Sate Sorigan Gosia sk cate cmt ier ered, Maire edie ee A 
By S. J. Cuapman, M.A. “‘ Probably the best recent critical exposition of the 
analytical method in economic science.” —Glasgow Herald. 


69. THE NEWSPAPER 


By G. Binney Dissiex, M.A, (Illustrated.) The best account extant of 
the organisation of the newspaper press, at home and abroad. 


77, SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE 


A Si a becead need cris aan Wiad Koa colts elite Masbobe telsivi's “psa loan PRE a 
By H. N. Braitsrorp, M.A. ‘The charm and strength of his style make 
his book an authentic contribution to literature.”— The Bookman. 


80. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING 


By ANEuRIN WILLIAMS, M.A. ‘‘A judicious but enthusiastic history, with much 
interesting speculation on the future of Co-partnership."—C. hristian World. 


81. PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE 


ee al rl le acne th a he Ss ce a a ET 
By B. N. Bennett, M.A. ‘‘A valuable contribution to what is perhaps the 
most important question of the day.” —Wew Statesman. 


83. COMMON-SENSE IN LAW 


CAS Sale etre oie ca ec OTS a Wo 
By Prof. P. VinocrapvorF, D.C.L. “It presents instructive illustrations 
of the nature and application of legal rules.” —Zducational Times. 


85. UNEMPLOYMENT 


piel one area tes ae ie ee 
By Prof. A. C. Pigou, M.A. ‘One of the best and most scholarly popular 
expositions of the main points concerned.”—Wational Review. 


96. POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: FROM 


BACON TO HALIFAX 


By G. P. Goocu, M.A. ‘Mr Gooch gives the ripe fruit of his immense 
historical knowledge. The theme is one of singular importance.” 


104. POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: FROM 
SPENCER TO THE PRESENT DAY 


selene lah ahi tcl mM Leah ne ne Toh SE, eres eiaer EASA 
By Ernest Barker, M.A. “Bold and suggestive in its handling of contem- 
porary theories and theorists, it shows a masterly grasp of historic principles.” 
—Scotsman. 


106. POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: THE 
UTILITARIANS FROM BENTHAM T0 /. 5S. 


MILL 
By W. L. Davinson, M.A., LL.D. 





MANY OTHER FUTURE VOLUMES IN PREPARATION 


London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls. 


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